Quit-Smoking Ads on Coffee Sleeves, Gas Station Pumps, Convenience Stores, Cash Jackets

A quit-smoking advertising campaign, placed by Blue Line Media for Santa Clara Dept of Public Health's Better World Advertising, has hit the streets in a big way with coffee sleeve ads, gas station pump ads, convenience store window ads and check-cashing envelope ads (i.e., cash jackets).

The ads inform coffee drinkers and others that lung function improves up to 30% after three cigarette-free months.

Each ad format was selected to reach a certain demographic:

The bus ads are especially helpful in areas of the city where other outdoor advertising formats, such as billboards, do not exist:

• the coffee sleeve ads reach cigarette-loving coffee drinkers
• the gas pump and convenience store ads target smokers where they buy cigarettes
• the check-cashing envelopes reach low-income residents

The ads are also printed in three languages (English, Spanish and Vietnamese), each of which is distributed in the respective geographic area where the language is predominant. To illustrate, Spanish-language coffee sleeve ads are distributed in Latino-area coffee shops. Similar targeting techniques are used for the other languages and ad formats.