Award-winning health campaign targeted Arabic-speaking men

21.11.06

A successful NSW Health campaign targeting Arabic-speaking men who smoke has won the prestigious National Multicultural Marketing Award for Government agencies.

The award to the Sydney South-West Area Health Service was announced in Sydney tonight at the seventeenth annual awards dinner hosted by the Premier Morris Iemma.

The awards are conducted by the Community Relations Commission For a multicultural NSW as a means of highlighting innovation in the private and public sectors in dealing with cultural diversity.

The Chair of the Commission, Stepan Kerkyasharian , said that the campaign was prompted by the fact that whilst across the general community only 21 percent of men now smoke, amongst Arabic-speaking men the figure is still 35 percent.

“It has been well established by now that multicultural marketing, or the dissemination of health info rmation directly towards language or cultural groups, does save lives.

“Many health bureaucrats now understand well that sometimes health issues have a cultural component. To effectively educate people about that issue it is sometimes better to talk directly to members of that cultural group. That’s multicultural marketing pure and simple!

“In this case the South West Area Health Service has done that and done it well to achieve a lower level of smoking amongst men in the Arab speaking community in south-west Sydney .

“Although the project aimed at reducing prevalence of tobacco smoking by four percent among Arabic-speaking community in South West Sydney, the benefits of the campaign obviously flowed to a broader area of Sydney and NSW”, Mr Kerkyasharian said.

The slogan for the advertising campaign was: There is no cigarette without loss.

Phase One of the campaign included radio advertisements and a radio competition, billboards at railway stations, newspaper ads, distribution of pamphlets and promotion at community festivals.

According to the official entry for the awards: “The campaign advertising played on the importance of children to Arabic-speaking families – in other words a man may not be convinced to quit smoking for his own health but may well be shamed into quitting for his children’s sake. Billboards showed a cigarette burning a photograph of the family into two parts with the caption: Don’t sacrifice your health and your family… sacrifice your cigarette!