Ads tagged with quitline phone number draws more interest than ads tagged with web address

Advertisements from the CDC's Tips From Former Smokers (Tips) campaign that included taglines promoting calls to a quitline number were more successful than ads promoting a cessation website, CDC and RTI International researchers report in the CDC journal Preventing Chronic Disease.

Quitlines increase smokers' success in quitting, but no more than 2 percent of U.S. smokers use a state quitline in any given year. The current study found that Tips campaign ads - featuring graphic and emotional true stories about the health consequences of smoking - result in increased calls to state quitlines when they offer quitline information. The same doses of ads offering information on a smoking-cessation website resulted in a smaller increase in website visits.

Researchers estimated that the Tips campaign was responsible for more than 170,000 additional calls to 1-800-QUIT-NOW during the 2012 campaign and that it would have generated approximately 140,000 additional calls if all ads were tagged with 1-800-QUIT-NOW.

This is the first study to calculate the magnitude of the dose-response of nationwide quitline calls to unit increases in weekly GRPs for national Tips campaign ads with quitline and website taglines.

According to the report, these results provide a direct estimate of the potential additional quitline capacity needed at the national level should future campaigns of similar scale exclusively use the 1-800-QUIT-NOW tagline.