Paul Fishlock:[137] My first involvement was with the National Tobacco Campaign when my then, new, agency pitched for business in late 1996. I think we got the good news call just before Christmas and we swung into action and did all the development work in ‘97. David do you want to talk about the pre-work before you handed the job to us?

David Hill: Very briefly. Quite a few of us here were involved in that campaign. We interviewed on behalf of Michael Wooldridge, the (Federal Health) Minister at the time who had appointed a Ministerial Tobacco Advisory Group (MTAG). We interviewed three agencies and two of them came along with the complete package. They knew all about how to convert the Australian population into non-smokers.

Paul’s agency said, ‘Actually, we don’t know how we’re going to do that yet. But we want to find out’. And they pitched with their credentials, not with a package. We chose them and we never regretted that.

Paul Fishlock: One of the really important aspects of all this was the access we were given to clinicians. This meant we could sit and really viscerally understand the pathology of tobacco-related diseases. We were given access to people to actually go and see autopsies in progress. It was an extraordinary privilege for a bunch of ad. guys, if you like. And straight out of that access came a lot of the ideas.

One anecdote. At one point we were talking about heart disease with David Celermajer, a cardiologist. [138] He said that sometimes when you’re operating you can actually feel the atheroma inside the artery. This was one of a number of occasions when the clinician’s brain collided with the creative marketing brain. Both myself and my agency partners who were there said, ‘So, hypothetically if you cut the ends, you could squeeze it out.’ This is the sort of idea you would absolutely never have got to if you hadn’t had access to the clinicians and the appetite to want to know that stuff.

Another example which came later in the piece: We were working on emphysema at the time, and I remember talking to Matthew Peters[139] on the phone. I said, ‘Can you describe for me what it’s like to have emphysema’.

He said, ‘It’s a bit like this. If you take a really deep breath, then if you take another little breath on top of it and then you breath out that little bit, then you breathe back in again.’ I said thank-you Matthew you’ve just written an amazing radio commercial, that I will now take credit for.’ (Laughter)

Pivotal to the success from our agency’s point of view was actually immersing ourselves in the subject and not doing what my industry is so often guilty of and that is sitting on the side, pretending you know it all, and that an ivory tower genius will solve it all.

David Hill: Paul, do you remember the beginning of those group meetings with doctors?

We learned that we had to allow about 45 minutes to an hour for the doctors to opinionate on how you ran advertising campaigns. Once we got that over with, they talked about the pathology we were discussing.

Trish Cotter: Can I just mention some really important research that underpinned those advertisements.

It was some research that David commissioned, specifically a review of all the qualitative research that had been done around the country. Everyone sent in their mountains of reports and Jason Boulter[140] read through it all and produced a beautiful annotated bibliography of everything.

And really what that research established was precisely the sorts of things smokers actually wanted to have more information on. Smokers were saying, ‘We want to know what smoking does to our health. We want to know what it looks like from the inside.’

And it was that that really changed, from my perspective, the strategy that was used in all the campaigning. The focus became the certain health consequences of smoking rather than anything else. It was a very significant shift in our campaign approach.

Ann Westmore: When do you date that shift from?

Trish Cotter: It was in 1996 when it was very apparent that smoking rates were levelling out and Carmen Lawrence[141] reaffirmed her interest in tobacco control.

Witness to the History of Australian Medicine