Advocacy Group Shows How Rebranding Can Rebuild Momentum

Truth Initiative

Robin Koval helped create a talking duck that spurred legions of people to purchase Aflac insurance. In her Herbal Essences “Yes, Yes, Yes” spot, she parlayed playful eroticism into a winning shampoo commercial and cemented her place as one of the nation’s top advertising executives.

Now, as president of the Truth Initiative, formerly the American Legacy Foundation, Ms. Koval is bringing the talents of persuasion she refined on Madison Avenue to the fight against smoking by teens.

The American Legacy Foundation was created after the 1998 settlement that resolved a hard-fought legal battle between major U.S. cigarette manufacturers and state attorneys general throughout the country. In the years since, the public-health nonprofit has used tobacco-company payments to create a series of edgy advertisements that many say have helped reduce the smoking rate among teenagers from 23 percent to 9 percent.

After those declines began to flatten out several years ago, the foundation’s board decided in 2013 that it needed to mount an all-out surge to crush smoking by youths. To achieve that goal, the group rebranded: It devoted more money to its signature ad campaign and brought in Ms. Koval to refine the nonprofit’s message.

The most obvious revision under Ms. Koval is the new name, Truth Initiative, which is taken from the group’s long-running ad campaign. The change was required, Ms. Koval said, because the “American Legacy Foundation” seemed to cloud the nonprofit’s biggest asset: the notion that it is speaking truth to power and exposing the tobacco industry’s lies.

When hearing the group’s original name, she notes, “People would ask, ‘Are you an insurance agency?’ or ‘Are you a bank?’ "

A Lighter Touch

Other changes accompanied the new moniker. In a move only a charity with a $1 billion endowment could make, Ms. Koval disbanded the nonprofit’s six-person development team, which had brought in less than $1 million during the past five years. Instead, Truth will tap more deeply into its investment portfolio. In fiscal 2015, which ended in June, the nonprofit spent about 9 percent of its long-term endowment on programs, a few notches above the 6 percent and 7 percent it spent during the previous two years.

Ms. Koval has also attempted to update the group’s message.

The campaign’s advertisements over the years have capitalized on the rebelliousness of youth and portrayed tobacco companies as corporate boogeymen. One, shot in a faux documentary style, showed young people depositing 1,200 body bags — representing the number of people who die from smoking each day — in front of a tobacco company’s office. Another spot, which aired during the 2004 Super Bowl, spoofed the cigarette industry in a parody ad for the fictional “Shards O’Glass” popsicle company, whose products, like cigarettes, are safest if not used at all.

New Way to Connect

Those ads, Ms. Koval says, were rooted in an outdated effort to connect with Generation Xers’ desire to stick it to “the man,” an impulse that doesn’t connect as well with kids today.

“Young people now don’t want to be against something, they want to be for something, and they are very aware of their power in the world” through the use of social media, she says.

One of the group’s latest efforts, a hashtag campaign called #FinishIt, maintains the Truth campaign’s original edginess while appealing to a desire among today’s teenagers to join movements for social good. As part of the campaign, teenagers are invited to share selfies others have taken while smoking. Young people are asked to “Erase and Replace” those photos with images like kazoos and silly glasses designed to ridicule the smoker.

Another participation campaign is based on music. Young people are invited to contribute a line to a song about the ways people minimize the danger of smoking by saying, for instance, they only smoke at parties, or they only smoke flavored cigarillos. The best lines will be used in a tune called “It’s a Trap,” by Nghtmre, a DJ and producer.

Fighting Funders’ Apathy

The Truth Initiative’s success in contributing to the decline in smoking by youths may have hampered its fundraising efforts, says Vince Willmore, a spokesman for Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, who calls the Truth Initiative one of the best public-health campaigns ever.

Mr. Willmore’s group has received a lot of support for its work in foreign countries from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Bloomberg Philanthropies, which combined have committed more than $810 million to combat smoking globally. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has long supported the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids’ work in the United States, but Mr. Willmore says there aren’t many other grant makers that support domestic antismoking efforts.

“Our challenge is to tell donors that despite our success, tobacco use is still a big problem in this country,” he says.

Cliff Douglas, vice president of tobacco control at the American Cancer Society, echoes that sentiment. Donors are more likely to support efforts to encourage an active lifestyle or reduce obesity than they are to back programs designed to prevent smoking. But young children, he says, remain vulnerable to tobacco companies’ inducements to light up.

“There’s a level of apathy, and a general sense in the public and among potential funders, that we’ve kind of dealt with this problem already. There is a general sense that people who suffer brought it on themselves.”

Tough Opponent

Last year, as part of its strategy to dedicate more of its endowment to social and mass-media campaigns, the Truth Initiative spent $105.2 million, nearly double its 2012 expenditures. That pales in comparison to what Ms. Koval calls the “sheer tonnage” of the tobacco industry’s $9.6 billion annual marketing effort in the United States, the figure reported by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

The best way to counterattack, Ms. Koval says, is to build a brand that big companies want to be a part of. Companies are attracted to the Truth Initiative, Ms. Koval says, because the nonprofit has forged a genuine connection with young people. Brands want to publicize both their concern for children’s health and their on-trend products — such as shoes and apparel from Vans and the makeup line Tyra Beauty, from the supermodel Tyra Banks. “Smoke your eyes, not cigarettes,” Ms. Banks suggests in social-media campaigns for her company’s smokey-hued eyeshadow.

Although corporate partnerships aren’t likely to generate as much revenue as annual investment gains from the group’s endowment, which totaled nearly $43 million last year, Ms. Koval says such partnerships will be more lucrative than the scuttled fundraising attempts.

‘A Vehicle for Trust’

The Truth Initiative’s stepped-up spending from its endowment probably isn’t sustainable over the long haul. Early results are promising, however: In the first year of increased spending, smoking by teenagers dropped slightly, from 9 percent to 7 percent, according the group.

Over the next two years, the Truth Initiative will attempt to measure the success of its efforts by polling the same set of 10,000 teenagers on their smoking habits. After that, Ms. Koval and the nonprofit’s board will have to decide whether to continue to pour so much money into the broad #finishit effort or scale back and focus on reaching specific subsets of young people.

One possibility: more focus on young adults from minority groups and students at historically black colleges and community colleges, places where Truth Initiative has already begun to devote more attention.

By emphasizing the “being cool” factor instead of the health effects of smoking, Truth is well poised to continue, and even deepen, its connection with image-conscious young people, says Nathalie Laidler-Kylander, a lecturer at the Hauser Institute for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard University.

But potential downsides loom: Teenagers could become overwhelmed by the number of products that relate to social causes, or one of the group’s corporate sponsors could fall out of favor with young consumers.

“At their essence, all nonprofit brands have is their image and the perception that they’re a legitimate, trustworthy organization,” Ms. Laidler-Kylander says. “You don’t have a product, so the brand becomes a vehicle for trust.”

Ms. Koval guards that image closely. In contrast to her efforts working for consumer-goods and services companies as an advertising executive, at the Truth Initiative she is trying to sell an idea, and is pitted against a well-financed foe.

Such a big task, she says, will require her to be more clever than marketers in the for-profit world.

“I love changing people’s minds,” she says. “And when I can change people’s minds for the better, that’s wonderful.”

Note: This article has been revised to update the rate of smoking among teenagers.