Focus groups approved of ‘political’ anti-drug ads
Focus groups consulted last fall were keen on a $7-million antidrug marketing campaign Health Canada was about to launch even though medical groups refused to endorse it because they thought it was too political.
The taxpayer-funded 10week advertising campaign, which wrapped up in late December, ran at the same time as Conservative radio ads that attacked Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau for promising to legalize and regulate marijuana.
The Canadian Medical Association, the College of Family Physicians of Canada and the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons refused to participate in the campaign, describing it last August as a “political football on Canada’s marijuana policy.”
But parents and teens in 10 focus groups who were shown versions in September of the campaign’s two 30-second television ads — one focusing on marijuana use and the other on prescription drug abuse by teens — appear to have raised no such objections.
In fact, says a report by Harris/ Decima, which did the research, parents deemed the ads appropriate for the government of Canada and found the information in them important and even shocking.
One ad stated that marijuana is 300- to 400-per-cent stronger than it was 30 years ago. It used a glass brain made of tubes to illustrate its message that smoking the drug “can seriously harm a teen’s developing brain.”
The notion that today’s marijuana is much stronger “was new to some participants and nearly all found it compelling,” the Harris/ Decima report says. “Many parents commented this was important information for them and that they could raise it in conversation with their teen.”
Parents and teens also preferred a version of the ad that began with a narrator saying “smoking a joint” can seem harmless.
Focus group participants said using “joint” made the tone of the ad more casual and conversation-ready. Many thought terms such as “pot” and “weed” would also work well. Marijuana, they said, was “the kind of term used by those in authority rather than by youth.”
The other ad, which stated that more than 80,000 Canadian teens had used prescription drugs to “get high” in the previous year, also tested quite well with all groups, the report says.
“It was often met with a strong reaction, since participants consistently described (prescription drug abuse) as a very troubling issue and, for many, it was new and shocking,” it says.