The Montana Meth Project
Nancy Reagan would be horrified. Almost 30 years ago, when a young California schoolgirl asked the U.S. First Lady what advice she would offer to help kids resist the pressure of peers to take drugs, she replied: "Just say no."
Since then, the U.S. government has spent billions of dollars trying to deter its citizens from using illegal drugs, with uneven success. But one hard-hitting effort, using the same techniques as any consumer marketing campaign, has been so successful that it has drawn attention from around the world and even helped shape the Canadian government's first anti-drug campaign since the early 1990s.
Over the past five years, Montana has gained a dubious international fame, becoming known as a hotbed of methamphetamine use but also as the place where a national battle against the drug got a toehold, with a series of graphic ads so powerful they were banned from daytime television.
In 2005, Thomas Siebel, a software billionaire who has a home in Montana, felt compelled to do something about the growing use of meth, which by some estimates was responsible for more than 80 per cent of the prison population in the rural state and half of the foster care population. Using millions of dollars of his own money, he founded the Montana Meth Project, which conducted months of original field research that sought the opinions and attitudes of non-users and addicts alike.
In September of that year, the MMP hit the air with its first wave of TV ads developed by the hot San Francisco agency Venables Bell & Partners. The goal? To "unsell" meth.
The project went to market with saturation coverage, ensuring 70 to 90 per cent of Montana teens would be exposed to one of its ads three to five times a week on TV alone, as well as radio, print and the Internet. For years, the Meth Project was the state's largest advertiser.
The ads were impossible to ignore. The first wave comprised four spots, all targeting those who might consider using meth for the first time. In one, which plays like a horror film, a girl taking a shower screams as she sees a future version of herself crouching in the corner of the tub, scarred and bleeding. Her junkie self moans, "Don't do it."
Another follows the insistent refrain of a girl at each successive step down her spiralling path of drug use: "I'm gonna try meth just once," she says, taking a hit from friends. "I'm gonna smoke this just once; I'm gonna steal just once." Walking away from the camera with a man at a party, she says, "I'm going to sleep with him for meth just once." The spot ends with her passed out, her face full of scars, as her younger sister looks to the camera and says: "I'm going to try meth just once."
"We decided to approach it as a consumer product," explains Nitsa Zuppas, the executive director of the Siebel Foundation, which backs the Meth Project. "When somebody said to a kid, 'Hey, give it a try,' at that moment, we wanted them to be really educated consumers."
Recognizing teens would reject anything that felt like a lecture from authority figures, the Montana efforts seem to take place in a Charlie Brown universe, practically devoid of adults. The research, says Ms. Zuppas, was clear. "They wanted the facts. They didn't want to be talked down to. They wanted to hear from their peers," she said.
The project tapped some high-profile film directors for the TV spots, all of whom know their way around emotional manipulation, including Tony Kaye ( American History X), Darren Aronofsky ( The Wrestler, the drug addiction film Requiem for a Dream), and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu ( Babel), as well as the acclaimed cinematographer Wally Pfister ( The Dark Knight).
Like any long-term advertising effort directed at consumers, the Montana Meth Project was conceived as a series of campaigns that built upon each other. The first two waves, rolled out within a year, focused on the damage that meth can do to users themselves. The third and fourth waves expanded the drug's blast radius, looking at its toxic effects on the relationships between users and their friends and loved ones.
Each spot in the fifth wave, which rolled out last month, begins with horrific depictions of the behaviour of some users (self-mutilation, prostitution), then ends with a focus on the burden of guilt absorbed by those who are left behind.
The campaign, which includes on-the-ground community involvement, is widely credited with decreasing teen meth use in the state by up to 63 per cent. And though some studies have questioned that data, the campaign was adopted by seven other states that were struggling with their own blossoming meth epidemic. Calls came in from around the world, including New Zealand, South Africa and Canada. The annual budget for the National Meth Project, a public-private partnership, is now in the range of $30-million (U.S.).
But when officials at Health Canada began to formulate their own anti-drug campaign two years ago, showing focus groups of 13- to 15-year-olds 10 ads from Britain, Australia and the Montana Meth Project, they found the U.S. messages didn't resonate.
"A lot of the kids, it was more marijuana and ecstasy that they were experimenting with," noted Jane Hazel, the director general in the marketing and communication services directorate of Health Canada. "They thought, 'Meth? Oh, I wouldn't really get that bad.' They found that too over the top."
Also, while hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on anti-drug advertising every year in the United States, that advertising category has been all but silent in Canada since the last such ads ran 17 years ago. The national conversations were entirely different.
"Canadians hadn't been exposed to any advertising like this in so long, and a lot of the [foreign]campaigns were the product of people being exposed over time. They were in a different place, I think, so we had to kind of go back to basics," Ms. Hazel said.
Which is why Canadians are seeing what is, by international standards, a campaign of rudimentary creative. Transit ads include a marijuana cigarette and the tagline: "Drugs, Not 4 Me." The website not4me.ca, hosted by Health Canada, bears the same Web 1.0 aesthetic of most of the federal government's clunky Internet offerings.
And in sharp contrast with the U.S. commercials, which were a parent-free zone, the single television spot in the Canadian campaign depicts a teen boy who goes to a party and, offered a toke, flashes forward in his mind to the imagined consequences: ecstasy use, fights with his mother, falling asleep in class and getting caught by a grown-up with drugs that fall out of his school locker.
Still, the Canadian strategy seems to be resonating: Hundreds of people have posted their own stories of drug abuse on the site, and the campaign is about to roll out a social media effort. Funding is thin, though: The federal government has committed a mere $30-million over five years, leaving no money for the creation of another TV spot - which, as any advertiser can tell you, means that the campaign is likely going to get very old very fast.