Foundry512 was given a nice surprise by the Institute for Health Promotion Research (IHPR) when the advertising agency’s partnership with the QUITXT Program was announced to be featured in their academic report, Direct Outreach and Clubs to Enroll cigarette Smokers in Mobile Cessation Services.
The paper, found in the National Library of Medicine, highlights the effective strategies taken by Foundry512 for their part in the QUITXT campaign.
Researchers came up with QUITXT, a free-messaging service targeting young adults who smoke, to help people quit their habits by offering them a “quitting coach” that gives consistent advice and inspiration for people trying to break the addiction.
The paper’s goal was to explore the methods of direct outreach. But after failing to reach their audience with other marketing companies, they eventually brought the Quitxt program to Foundry512 to look for a solution. The agency’s answer was to create an engaging face-to-face experiential campaign that would be both understanding and sympathetic to the public.
“We had to come up with a culturally sensitive and appropriate way to approach people about dropping a habit while they’re actively consuming the habit,” said Jesus Trujillo, Account Executive at Foundry512. “You really had to understand where these people were coming from.”
Researchers, including multiple industry experts and professionals, closely followed the methods of Foundry512 from the planning process to the end of the campaign. The study showed just how determined Foundry512 was to get everything perfect before the campaign launch, from finding the right team to planning the street routes.
And with the help of Mayte Ibarra-Sachez, Foundry512’s Methodology Creator, who was in charge of creating training exercises and questionnaires, the agency was able to refine its approach. “We weren’t going to miss a beat, so we were optimizing all the time for little things,” says Trujillo.
Overall, the study showed that it was, in fact, possible to deeply connect with a specialized group through direct outreach and a carefully planned experiential marketing campaign.
The core of the issue is solving an acquisition problem of getting a conversion at the least likely time,” said Jesus Trujillo, Account Executive at Foundry512. “Our F512 framework allowed us to produce a strategy that created communications and direct approaches that were programmatically specific to demographics and scaled when deployed to audience groups out in the wild.”