Identify a real-life public relations campaign that attempted to put a positive spin on an otherwise negative situation.

Essay by cookie10College, UndergraduateA, March 2007

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The “Quit Now” is a public relations campaign which uses the stories of people who either quit smoking or had a bad experience with smoking. This campaign is run to make a national effort to help people who want to quit smoking. It is run by The National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Both agencies want to put a positive spin on quitting smoking by implementing the negative message that people continue to die from, “tobacco-related disease,” (http://www.nih.gov/news/pr/sep2006/nci-29.htm) and they feel they can help one can prevent this.

The first thing that I noticed while viewing this campaign was how the Public Relations Program was put into effect. The first step of this program is information gathering. Quit Now had taken submissions from cigarette smokers by asking them why they wanted to quit, how they did quit, and what has happened to their health from smoking.

This organization then chose how they were to be planning on using this information , which is the second phase of the Public Relations Program. After they go over the submissions they plan to use these stories to communicate there message across the country. Quit Now will communicate the successful quitter’s stories and the not so successful smoker’s stories for television and radio spots to the country. This campaign has also implemented the fourth step of the Public Relations outline by giving people access to reports that are based on surveys which have evaluated the life rates of smokers versus people who have since quit smoking.

The next thing I noticed about the Quit Now campaign was how they are using public relations online. Quit Now utilizes websites such as http://smokefree.gov, http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/tobacco and http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/. These websites are used in an effort to help people quit by,