The Real Cost, an anti-tobacco program funded by the FDA, targets young teens to inform them of the dangers of smoking, in hopes of nipping the habit in the bud before it can even begin. And we knew that on social, if we didn’t nail the messaging, this audience would gleefully tear us to pieces in the comments.

 

So, we needed to make clinical information, well, less clinical, and craft it into something teens would actually want to share rather than mock or scoff at. The answer seemed obvious: we had to get weird.

 

We used our team of animators and illustrators to turn even the most scientific and emotionless side-effects of smoking into fun and engaging characters. This effort resulted in over a million views. But more importantly, 348,498 teens were averted from cigarettes because of our campaign——exceeding FDA’s goal by 48,498.