Suffolk County Council

When the Council local to our Ipswich office needed a video produced to support an internal initiative and inform external stakeholders, we were really happy to be involved. That successful collaboration led to them asking us to respond to a tender a year later.

Whilst the Council have a huge number of priorities, a major focus is supporting Suffolk to be a healthier community. The Feel Good Suffolk initiative has been designed to support people in their journey to stop smoking, be active and attain a healthy weight. It’s this initiative that Suffolk County Council were seeking vendor support for, specifically, to promote the smoking cessation support program. 

In responding to their tender, we undertook a wealth of research including quantitative and qualitative feedback from people on what motivated them to stop smoking. Our research uncovered a number of anti-smoking campaigns, with the common thread of fear and shame as their main driver. However, looking at behavioural insights on addiction,  it became clear to us that this approach wasn’t working. Whilst emotion is motivating, it has to be the right kind, and that ‘right kind’ depends on the audience. 

Ipswich Town Football Club is the embodiment of our target audience, they’ve worked hard, developed resilience and have ‘never stopped trying’ to achieve what they have, which in their case has been back-to-back promotions to the Premier league. That’s how the ‘never stop trying’ campaign was born (in spite of challenges in the path to victory which tested our own resolve!) 

The campaign objectives centred around providing comprehensive metrics for reach, engagement and conversion of:

• Quit rates during the course of the campaign for those who wish to quit smoking
• People who have downloaded or signed up for resources and more information
• Social media engagement
• Visits to the campaign website

The key target audience for the campaign, making up the largest proportion of smokers, is routine and manual workers. But we wanted to go beyond a demographic label to understand what are these people interested in, what are their passions and challenges, what drives them emotionally? We were reminded of the award winning Norwich City and Samaritans campaign, ‘Check in on those around you’. This train of thought led us to Portman Road, home of the County’s pride, Ipswich Town Football Club (ITFC).

Ipswich Town is the embodiment of our target audience, they’ve worked hard, developed resilience and have ‘never stopped trying’ to achieve what they have, which in ITFCs case has been back-to-back promotions to the Premiere league. That’s a journey that the team and fans are immensely proud of, and provided a perfect parallel with the journey to stop smoking which can take many attempts over many years. That’s why we pitched an approach to turn ‘anti’ messaging on its head, focusing instead on the pride people can take in stopping smoking.

The Council liked the concepts we put forward, which all leveraged the power of image and video as the best means of connecting with the target audience. We proposed a simple authentic approach featuring local people rather than actors. They were impressed by our thinking and the fact that we offered a different perspective on the challenge.

We were really excited to be awarded the contract, as everybody on our pitch team was deeply invested, motivated by the experiences of those they cared about who’d suffered as a result of smoking. The kick off of the campaign came hot on the heels of the Tobacco and Vapes Bill being set out in the King’s Speech. The biggest public health intervention in a generation to break the cycle of addiction and we were pleased to be playing our part in helping people break free. 

Thanks to an extensive database of local residents who had used Feel Good Suffolk’s support service, we were able to test both the fear and pride based campaign messages on a willing sample. This categorically confirmed the right direction and we started planning. Fortuitously, Ipswich has their biggest match to date coming up on 24th November, pitted against Manchester United, a team they’d suffered a humiliating 9-0 defeat to in 1995

We set to interview people at the match both about Ipswich’s journey to the Premier League and their journey to giving up smoking. The plan was to edit together the interviews and footage in such a way as it seemed they were telling the story of ITFC’s journey, before revealing at the end that it was their journey of ‘never stop trying’ to give up smoking. 

Whilst we all acknowledged that this was a high risk approach, dependent on finding willing volunteers to engage, we decided to go for it. Having taken every possible step to ensure the output we needed, including pre-arranging interviews, these dependencies resulted in not getting the footage we needed to adequately articulate our point and achieve the brief. 

Being a resilient bunch who ‘never stop trying’, we pivoted the concept to achieve what we needed to launch the campaign within the budget of the remaining day of filming. We met our two wonderful volunteers, James and Eddy in the empty stadium and conducted the missing interviews to edit together with footage of the team and fans in action. 

The final video has since launched on the dedicated campaign webpage along with a series of campaign assets that have amplified the campaign across different media, including an outdoor campaign on bus rears. We’re delighted to have pushed through to deliver a campaign that we’re all really proud of and hope contributes towards helping the community and saving lives

Only launching in February 2025, it’s still early days as far as results for the year long campaign are concerned, but it was great to see it well supported with local media coverage in the East Anglian Daily Times. 

Month 1 insights indicate that there have been 777 visits to the campaign landing page and out of those visits, 157 people have gone onto self refer themselves through Feel Good Suffolk support. Comparing the referral rate of this campaign (23%), to the whole of the website (12%), shows how the campaign resonated with the ITFC audience in a meaningful way. This has revealed a community of people that likely have less visibility of the support programmes like those provided by Feel Good Suffolk. As well as, highlighting the importance of reaching people where they feel most comfortable; like that of the great Ipswich Town Football Club. Importantly, 38% of traffic has come through organic social channels, showing this campaign is being shared among the community. 

Chris Pyburn, Head of Digital and Communication at Suffolk County Council has said of the campaign:

“The Never Stop Trying campaign was an opportunity for us to showcase the countywide Feel Good Suffolk service, forging an innovative collaboration with Ipswich Town Football Club. StrategiQ provided some great creative input and ideas to shape the campaign and worked closely with the public health team at all stages to deliver a compelling outcome. As the campaign name suggests, even when things didn’t always go according to plan, StrategiQ ‘never stopped trying’ and we’re proud of the result, which has so far seen increasing numbers of smokers seeking support to quit from the service.”

By using data to understand who the target audience for this campaign were, their professions and interests, the campaign could be optimised to:

• feature characters that they could identify with in a place they could identify with
• be promoted via targeted digital activity
• be delivered via optimal positioning of OOH in locations where there are high concentrations of the target audience present.

This campaign has accelerated the pace at which SCC have been able to raise awareness and achieve sign-ups to the program.

When our Plan A approach didn’t work out, we took an innovative approach to Plan B which achieved the desired outcome without negatively impacting the budget.

“The Never Stop Trying campaign was an opportunity for us to showcase the countywide Feel Good Suffolk service, forging an innovative collaboration with Ipswich Town Football Club. StrategiQ provided some great creative input and ideas to shape the campaign and worked closely with the public health team at all stages to deliver a compelling outcome. As the campaign name suggests, even when things didn’t always go according to plan, StrategiQ ‘never stopped trying’ and we’re proud of the result, which has so far seen increasing numbers of smokers seeking support to quit from the service.”

Chris Pyburn, Head of Digital and Communication at Suffolk County Council