In collaboration with three other graduate students we created a social marketing campaign entitled "Harmless Hookah" designed to increase college students' knowledge about hookah smoking, its effects, influence norms and attitudes related to hookah smoking, and ultimately decrease hookah use. Our campaign included two public service announcements (PSAs) and a website. In addition to background research on the effects of hookah smoking and its prevalence in our target population, we conducted interviews as a part of our formative research. From these interviews we determined common themes which we used to guide us as we created our PSAs.
This, and the following two pages, are storyboards I created for the filming of our first PSA. In this commercial the college student sees his friends engaging in activities which they mistakenly think are healthy alternatives to an unhealthy behavior. At the end of the commercial this character refuses cigarettes before stopping at the door of a hookah lounge. The implied connection for this character and the viewer is that if we take the time to stop, hookah smoking may be more harmful than we think. This is the story board in which the main character offers his friend a soda and she refuses because it is unhealthy before drinking a sugary energy drink.
In this scene the main character offers his friend a burger and she refuses because she is "trying to eat healthy." She then is presented with a very unhealthy cobb salad. This was modified in our final cut to this character simply drenching her salad with dressing.
This is the final scene in which the character who has been viewing his friends engaging in ironically unhealthy behavior refuses cigarettes before pausing to think at the door of a hookah lounge.
I filmed and edited this PSA, entitled "double take," together. An earlier version of this PSA was refined after a focus group screening. Our overall budget for this film was $25.
Harmless Hookah PSA
In collaboration with three other graduate students we created a social marketing campaign entitled "Harmless Hookah" designed to increase college students' knowledge about hookah smoking, its effects, influence norms and attitudes related to hookah smoking, and ultimately decrease hookah use. Our campaign included two public service announcements (PSAs) and a website. The PSAs were designed to be uploaded as stand-alone videos on YouTube, inserted as timeline ads in Facebook, and embedded into the Harmless Hookah website.
The theoretical underpinnings of our campaign and PSAs were based on the Elaboration Likelihood Model and sought to engage college-age students in scenarios which encouraged them to think about how smoking hookah might be contradictory to their overall health goals, and encourage them to centrally process our messages with supplemental information resources.
The goals for "Harmless Hookah?" were to:
1. Educate college students about the chemicals contained in hookah and its possible health effects.
2. Influence the attitudes of college students toward hookah smoking using evidence-based facts and credible information.
3. Encourage current hookah smokers to abstain or limit their hookah smoking.
The design of this social media campaign was a part of a semester-long course in health communication. Our overall budget for this project was $25.
