Quitline SMS idea prompts record reply

Lara Sinclair | October 27, 2007

TRIALS in Queensland, NSW and South Australia that allow people to contact the Quit Smoking hotline by SMS are helping younger smokers kick the habit.

In Queensland, responses to TV advertisements including an option for viewers to make contact by sending an SMS are understood to have risen by 400 per cent. In one trial of two commercials that went to air in a single hour, 88 per cent of all responses were received by SMS instead of voice calls.

Details of people text messaging are recorded, and a counsellor calls back at the next available opportunity -- perhaps the following Monday if the SMS was sent on a Friday night or over a weekend.

The medium has proved most popular with smokers aged 17 to 36 -- those who often consume other media, including mobile phones and the internet, while watching TV.

Queensland Health senior policy adviser Helen Taylor says enabling smokers to send a text message to the Quit Smoking hotline without disrupting their TV viewing had helped a new audience get help to quit.

"We expected a positive reaction from smokers, but we would never have anticipated increasing our advertising response by 400 per cent without impacting on consumers' brand experience," Taylor said.

Responses to the National Tobacco Campaign are understood to have climbed since trialling SMS. For every person who calls the Quit Smoking hotline, at least three people send an SMS, according to information supplied by AdIQ, whose technology allows people to send texts to existing 13 and 1300 numbers.

The trial results come as another Australian anti-smoking message found a new audience. A new version of the famous "sponge" commercial, which shows tar being wrung out of a sponge representing the lungs of a smoker, is on air again in NSW, 25 years after it was first created.

Research from NSW Health showed two in three younger smokers still found the commercial -- regarded as one of the most memorable in Australian advertising history -- made them want to stop smoking.

The ad could also be screened in Victoria, which has picked up the rights to screen the ad, and in New York. Assistant Minister for Health, Verity Firth, said the ad had been sold to a multimillion-dollar anti-tobacco fund set up by the city's mayor, Michael Bloomberg.

In Victoria, the implementation of smoking bans in pubs has also sparked a rise of 27 per cent in calls to the Quitline -- leading to levels similar to the traditional peak in January as people strive to live up to New Year's resolutions.

Trish Cotter, director of cancer prevention at the Cancer Institute of NSW, says the SMS trial in that state had also pushed response rates north.

"Cancer Institute NSW had an increase in engagements of nearly 300 per cent from our broadcast advertising, with no evidence of cannibalisation of calls to the Quitline," Cotter said. The Cancer Institute NSW is using mobile response on all of its broadcast advertising.

Quit SA communication and campaign co-ordinator Mary Crawford says SMS-enabling the state's 13QUIT phone number had reached an audience that had been reluctant to contact the Quitline.

"Our initial analysis is also demonstrating the potential of the mobile service to allow us to positively impact our media strategy, for example advertising at times when the Quitline was previously closed, or when people were unlikely to call, for example, during high-engagement peak-time television," Crawford said.

The trials indicate allowing in-bound SMS messaging could boost responses in other health-related marketing.

Other health bodies have experimented with SMS messaging in the past, often in outward-bound communications.

The Red Cross Blood Bank donor database includes mobile phone numbers. Donors are sent regular text message reminders in order to increase the number of times they donate in a year and in times of high demand.

Meanwhile, the Pacific nation of Niue is understood to be considering paying its smokers to quit.

Two hundred of the country's 1500 people smoke, according to reports. Premier Young Vivian is considering paying smokers up to $1700 each to stop, rather than bear associated costs such as sending them to New Zealand for health care.

"If your health bill is climbing beyond $NZ200,000, up to $NZ1 million per year, then it is preferable to pay (smokers to quit)," Vivian said.