Think HQ’s Multilingual Quit Campaign Tackles Smoking in Priority Communities

Award-winning integrated agency Think HQ has delivered an in-language campaign for Quit, a program of Cancer Council Victoria.

Quit’s multicultural campaign, The Hanky, is built on a creative strategy developed by Think HQ’s multicultural specialist CultureVerse team. The campaign launch comes at an exciting time for Think HQ, following its recent B-Corp accreditation and a run of headline-grabbing national campaigns across its integrated service offering.

The Hanky, focusing on priority populations with higher smoking rates than the average Victorian population, was designed to reach Arabic-speakers, Mandarin-speakers and Vietnamese-speakers, with all campaign assets translated in all three languages.

Head of media and Communications at Cancer Council Victoria, Kelly Dienaar said, “We’re deeply committed to supporting multicultural communities and ensuring that we see smoking rates decline across priority population groups.  It’s been meaningful to see this important campaign come to life. We hope it will motivate more Arabic, Vietnamese and Chinese speaking people to start their quitting journey.” 

Jessica Billimoria, head of cultureVerse, said, “​​The Quit campaign delivers critical health messages where they are needed, built on a powerful concept and communicated in the language of each target group.”

“We are proud to have delivered Quit’s bespoke campaign to motivate multicultural communities to change their smoking behaviours."

These target audiences tend to smoke in social and work situations when they are with other smokers, and may not smoke heavily or often. The campaign needed to convince them that every cigarette is doing them damage, even if they don't smoke every day.

The campaign drives home the links between short-term signs and progression to the long-term impacts caused by the effects of smoking. It is grounded in research that highlighted a need in multicultural communities for hard-hitting advertising that persuaded them to reconsider their smoking behaviours and the respiratory harms.

The campaign imagery simply but powerfully illustrates the serious, cumulative effect of smoking on respiratory health. 

The media campaign is supplemented by additional activities including two webinars with health professionals sharing campaign insights. 

Campaign materials running across radio, digital and print include four videos (two x 30 second spots and 2 x 15 second cutdowns), a 30 second audio spot, social assets, posters and website copy.

The six-week campaign launched on 7 October and runs until 16 November 2024.