UK Smokers Get An Hour Back In Their Day But Years Back In Their Life

Campaign from QUIT capitalises on the end of daylight savings 23 OCTOBER 2014, LONDON – QUIT, the UK charity that helps smokers to stop, has launched a campaign that cleverly capitalises on the end of Daylight Savings by showing smokers how they could get years back in their life via the annual reminder to put clocks back an hour. It’s a well-known fact that smoking shortens the life of a smoker, literally taking years off. But by quitting you can get many of those years back – if not all of them.

The campaign that will run in all of the UK’s main daily newspapers this week, on selected billboards (including a giant digital one in Piccadilly Circus), online and social, shows hands on a clock depicted as cigarettes, set at the time all Britons need to reverse, 2am this Sunday, 26 October. Words replace numbers on the clock face: ‘Tonight you get an hour back. Quit and you’ll get years’, to be read anti clockwise to strengthen the ‘time back’ idea. The ads drive people to a website quit.org.uk where they type their age, when they started smokng and numbers of cigarettes smoked daily, to calculate an estimate of how many years they would get back if they were to quit today. According to the calculator the average 25-year-old male smoker in Britain – who smokes 12 cigarettes a day and started smoking at 16 – would get back 6.23 years of life if he quit today. QUIT CEO Glyn McIntosh said: “Think of all the things you could do in three and a half years. There’s no time like the present to quit the deadly habit of smoking. “It was a genius idea from the guys at our ad agency, M&C Saatchi Sydney, to link quitting with the end of Daylight Savings. It’s an event that effects everyone living in the UK, obviously including every smoker, so It’s enabled us to get enormous awareness and traction. “And it’s great that people can go to the website, punch in their details and get an estimated figure – the time of their life – they would get back if they were to quit smoking today. It’s such a compelling, tactile way to show people the ultimate benefit of not smoking.” – ENDS – NOTE TO EDITORS UK smoking facts* Tobacco smoking caused an estimated 101,000 deaths in the UK in 2010 – almost a fifth (18%) of all deaths from all causes. Smoking caused an estimated 43,000 cancer deaths in the UK in 2010 – more than a quarter (27%) of all cancer deaths. Just under 1 in 5 UK adults currently smoke cigarettes (2013). This equates to an estimated 9.4 million UK adult cigarette smokers. The average number of cigarettes smoked daily in the UK is 12 for males and 11 for females (2013). Worldwide smoking facts 1 billion adults (800 million men and 200 million women) currently smoke cigarettes. Tobacco use kills almost 6 million people worldwide each year.

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