UT Health San Antonio wants to help people of all ages live tobacco-free.
Below are evidence-based prevention education programs with interactive and printable material you can use to talk to young adults or kids about staying tobacco-free.
The Real Cost
The Real Cost national web site and campaign is one component of prevention media efforts developed by the Food and Drug Administration’s tobacco public education campaigns.
For years, the tobacco industry has used advertisements promoting smoking aimed at creating an appeal towards smoking and downplaying the harms. From Joe Camel, the “hip” camel, to placing tobacco ads in convenience stores or on billboards. The Real Cost campaign wanted to get ahead of this coercion and created ads that addressed teens’ perceptions and beliefs towards tobacco. They began this trek by using an evidence-based framework for tobacco prevention and collecting community input to develop content for their ads. Once the ads were created and refined, the campaign staff embarked on spreading awareness through messages intended to resonate with at-risk youth. Ads were placed in video and audio streaming platforms, social media, gaming platforms and a variety of youth influencers event joined the cause.
The Food and Drug Administration wanted to measure the campaign’s impact and hired an independent research firm to conduct a multi-year evaluation of the program. The research demonstrated that more than 90 percent of campaign ads run by the Real Cost had reached the target audience less than a year after the launch. Additionally, there was a 30 percent decrease in youth smoking initiation. According to the findings from the evaluation, between February 2014 and November 2016 the Real Cost prevented the initiation of smoking in up to 587,000 youth aged between 11 to 19. Such an impact is expected to contribute towards over $53 billion in savings for families, individuals, and our country when it comes to smoking related costs.
The campaign continues to make an impact. In a recent evaluation taken from data collected in 2023, researchers found that teens who saw the ads were more likely to agree that smoking affects one’s appearance, body and health outlook.
Tips from Former Smokers
The Tips from Former Smokers campaign is a national tobacco education effort aimed at sharing the implications of smoking through emotionally evocative media. Stories from former smokers and their family members depict the struggles associated with smoking. They discuss the challenges of quitting smoking after you start and how tobacco has impacted their lives for the worse. To increase engagement among hard-to-reach groups, Tips strategically selects former smokers who share similarities with this population. The campaign was launched by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2012.
The Tips campaign has relatable videos for a wide variety of audiences that highlight the consequences of smoking on the individuals and their loved ones. Over 45 people share their story of how they were impacted by the long-term health effects from smoking or being around smokers. The selection of videos ranges from stories of people who initiated smoking at an early age, to videos that share a smoker’s experience with a tobacco related disease.
The Tips campaign also works to increase awareness of free quit-smoking resources. Their website includes culturally sensitive social media content, videos and print ads.
Peers Against Tobacco
Peers Against Tobacco is a peer-led initiative to eliminate tobacco use on college campuses. This group offers support for student leaders and school administration to become advocates for this cause. They developed the PAT Education Curriculum, officially called Tobacco Edu. This self-paced curriculum serves to educate students about the consequences of smoking, address social norms relating to tobacco, and encourage students to avoid smoking initiation.
Truth Initiative
Truth Initiative is America’s largest non-profit public health organization dedicated to making tobacco use a thing of the past.
Truth speaks, seeks, and spreads the truth about tobacco through education, tobacco-control research and policy studies, community activism and engagement, and innovation in tobacco dependence treatment. To receive regular emails with all the latest information, go here and scroll to the bottom to subscribe.