The Department of Health Anti-Smoking: Wanna Be Like You

New campaign via Miles Calcraft Briginshaw Duffy London urges parents not to keep smoking in the family. Smokers warned that kids ‘wanna be like you’ A new £5.2 million campaign is being launched that will highlight the danger to parents that their smoking will dramatically increase their children’s chances of becoming a smoker too. The new NHS Smokefree advertising campaign - which will run on TV, online, radio, ambient and outdoor media – launches on the 2nd June. The TV advertising is set to the music of ‘I wanna be like you’ from ‘The Jungle Book’ movie and starts by showing harmless examples of how young children copy their mums and dads as they go about their daily life – relaxing at home, doing household chores and even watching TV. The film then takes a sinister turn and ends with a little girl picking up a crayon to copy her mother as she takes a drag on a cigarette.

A hard-hitting poster campaign picks up this same theme, featuring a child’s crayon resting on an ashtray, along with press adverts showing childish artistic portrayals of their parents smoking. The campaign launch coincides with the Department of Health launching ‘The Future of Tobacco Control’ consultation paper which aims to start a debate around further measures that would stop people smoking and prevent young people starting to smoke1. It also coincides with World No Tobacco Day on 31st May, a worldwide awareness day designed to highlight the dangers of smoking that this year is based on the theme of ‘Tobacco Free Youth’.