RIESTER

When one campaign sweeps every award category for which it was submitted, you know you’re on to something special — and RIESTER’s Venomocity is something special.

Later tonight, the Arizona Department of Health Services’ Bureau of Tobacco and Chronic Disease, together with RIESTER, will be recognized at the IABC Phoenix Copper Quill Awards for its hard-hitting youth tobacco prevention campaign: Venomocity.

Venomocity captures the complexity of nicotine addiction for a youth audience in an unexpected fashion.  The strategy behind Venomocity is a result of qualitative and quantitative research conducted in Arizona with youth ages 12 to 17 that revealed an irreverent attitude toward commercial tobacco use. In fact, while young Arizonans were well aware of the health implications of tobacco use and its impacts, these consequences were perceived as far-removed from their immediate lives and something that happens “to old people.” This lethargic perspective on the issue demonstrated the need to deliver a unique anti-tobacco message, one that would jolt young people into the realization that the repercussions of tobacco use are immediate.

With this wealth of knowledge in hand, ADHS charged RIESTER with the development of an innovative anti-smoking campaign for youth challenging kids in their environment: online.

It could be seen by some as a real challenge to create a campaign on youth tobacco prevention as renowned nationally as the one we developed more than a decade ago that ran in 40 states across the country, featuring the “Tumor-causing, teeth-staining, smelly, puking habit” commercials you likely saw on TV. But this type of work is in our blood, and we were up to the challenge.

The cornerstone of the digitally- driven campaign is venomocity.com, a “lair” featuring things that teens would find especially interesting, such as a series of RIESTER-developed video games and links to the Venomocity social media handles like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and flickr.

This winning collaborative effort will be recognized by the IABC in five categories: Community and Government Relations; Marketing Communications (communication management); Audiovisual; Electronic Communications; and Marketing Communications (electronic).

Tonight’s event at the Tempe Center for the Arts is sure to be one of the highlights for Venomocity as the team receives recognition for a truly integrated effort that included participation from many of RIESTER’s and ADHS’s team members. We’re honored to have had the privilege to develop Venomocity from the ground up, and look forward to its evolution in the coming years.

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