Client: Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids, Washington DC
Context: Gatefield in partnership with CTFK, and other in-country civil society partners successfully lobbied the Federal Ministry of Health to approve nine tobacco control regulations and generated huge media coverage for the ministerial announcement on the May 31st World No Tobacco Day event. Understanding that the measures would be met by a strong tobacco industry resistance campaign, it became imperative to build public support for the newly announced provisions.
Solution: Gatefield working together with the Federal Ministry of Health and CTFK helped to develop a six months advocacy and social marketing campaign that sought to rally the general public to support the measures and narrowing down to the smoke-free public spaces regulation and also influence other stakeholders to join the implementation efforts. Gatefield created a branded campaign tagged #ClearTheAir. The campaign launched with a social media conversation around the hashtag and an event that brought together stakeholders including heads of governments and multilateral agencies, civil society activists and celebrities who were recruited as campaign influencers and ambassadors including Nigerian pop sensations, Mr. Eazi and Timi Dakolo. Creative content was developed for the campaign including two video ads and tons of visual materials that explained the provisions. Media and health journalists were also engaged with pitch documents to help gain understanding of the issues and to frame the conversation around the context of NCDs especially Cancers, Stroke, CVS and larger problem of drug abuse which led to a number of reports on the media. Gatefield also launched a challenge with prizes to mobilise grassroots to further disseminate the information.
Outcomes:
- Announcement of celebrity ambassadors resulted in over 100 earned media mentions and attention for the campaign. By the end of the campaign (May – November), over a thousand media mentions around related to the campaign was recorded.
- #ClearTheAir reached over two million users on Twitter and No. 1 trending topic in Nigeria with over 1500 tweets
- Facebook engagement reached over 1 million users
- 522 activists (109 women, 413 men) from all the 36 states in Nigeria and FCT participated in the challenge and joined a community of anti tobacco activists. A university participated and created a Tobacco Free Club
- Activists pressured a music superstar, Olamide to apologise for promoting tobacco products in his viral music video.
- The campaign earned special commendation from the World Health Organisation FCTC secretariat in Geneva.
