The Background
Ireland is recognised as a global leader in tobacco control, yet smoking remains the leading preventable cause of ill health and premature death, causing over 4,500 deaths annually and placing sustained pressure on healthcare services. Today, 17% of the population smoke and 14% smoke daily, with no decline since 2019 (Healthy Ireland Survey 2024).
The HSE’s national QUIT campaign supports smokers through QUIT.ie, the QUITline, digital tools, text supports and community Stop Smoking Advisors. It positions quitting as the most important step for improving health and shows that support significantly increases success. Smokers may make up to thirty quit attempts, but are four times more likely to quit with support. Smoking prevalence is highest among C2DE men aged 25–44.
The 2025 objectives were to:
- Anchor messaging to “Take Back Control” and the 28-day milestone to ensure the vulnerable don’t regress,
- Beat 2024 Ad Recall figure of 57%.
- Drive measurable engagement with HSE quit services.
- Beat 2024 sign up figure of 8,941.
- Beat 2024 Web Traffic Sessions of 548,753
- Prioritise targeted reach among C2DE men 25–44 to deliver behaviour change and action.
- Increase NRT usage
- Shift perceptions and drive action amongst this audience.
- Demonstrate how this delivered on overall plan signups.
This campaign was shortlisted for the Best TV Strategy Award at the 2026 TAMI Awards
The Challenge
The overall Comms strategy was centred around two pillars:
Anchor – Using quality high reach media at key moments to reach all smokers and ensure the vulnerable do not regress.
Expand – Ensuring our media cut through to hardened smokers who are tougher to motivate by increasing frequency.
The media strategy aligned to this had three distinct pillars.
The role of media here was to
- Deliver mass reach while over indexing to C2DE audiences.
- Targeting our most vulnerable segments at key connection moments.
- Leveraging digital channels to deliver Quit plan signups.
AV played a leading role in the overall strategy, designed to deliver broad national reach while deliberately increasing weight among priority C2DE audiences. The approach balanced scale, frequency, and timing to build long term memory structures and prompt action at moments when smokers are most receptive to quitting.
AV functioned as the primary driver of scale and cultural impact. As continuous TV presence was not affordable, so the team at Spark deployed TV in strategically timed bursts aligned to key behavioural moments when intent to quit is highest. Weight was concentrated in January to align with New Year resolutions, in March to coincide with Lent in 2025, and to capture anyone who did not successfully quit in January and wants to try again and in October ahead of the busy Christmas period when priorities shift. These bursts were further strengthened by aligning activity with high attention, appointment to view programming ensuring maximum visibility and impact during moments of collective viewing.
Supporting television was an always on AV layer across Broadcaster VOD and YouTube. This ensured sustained year-round visibility among people that smoke, maintaining reach and reinforcing messaging between TV bursts. The continuous presence helped build memory over time, keeping quitting front of mind even outside peak periods. As the campaign entered its third year with strong established ad recall, the team prioritised cost efficiencies by using shorter edits across digital AV. This enabled them to extend budget, protect continuity, and maintain effective frequency without compromising coverage.
A connection led planning approach underpinned the strategy, ensuring that AV delivery was not only broad but purposeful. Spark Foundry identified that increased frequency would be critical to drive action among our priority audiences of C2DE men aged 25 to 44 where smoking prevalence remains highest. Planning therefore deliberately over indexed against these cohorts.
For men, football, particularly Premier League and Champions League fixtures, provided strong indexing and consistent engagement, making it a key environment for driving frequency and reinforcement. By tailoring placement in this way, it ensured that higher frequency was delivered where it would have the greatest impact, while maintaining a broad national footprint.
Overall AV accounted for 70% of our total media budget.
The Strategy
Each burst of TV activity aligned to key moments (January, March and October) was planned to target an all-adult audience with scheduling ensuring a maximised presence to the C2DE focused audience. Each burst was planned to a minimum 3+ Target of 47% to ensure sufficient cut through and drive significant reach.
This activity was supplemented by 10” YouTube and BVOD to build incremental reach and increase frequency. The team targeted content on both platforms that focused on the key cohorts such as entertainment strands for women and sports for men.
Outside of TV bursts the VOD strategy always on to maximise recall and maintain frequency to drive action.
In the absence of major sporting events in 2025 Spark Foundry looked at the big opportunities around appointment to view TV. Aligning to RTEs flagship show for the year through a bespoke package consisting of 6 centre break spots and 300k VOD impressions ensured they had strong presence around one of the most successful TV show launches in recent times.
This package delivered a 25% 1+ reach to all adults.
- Premier Sports Sponsorship
Premier Sports is the sole rights provider for showing Saturday 3pm Premier League Kick Offs in addition to having first match choice for Champions League Games on Tuesday and Wednesday nights. This represented a great opportunity to reach that key male segment consistently on a weekly basis through sponsorship of the coverage across both competitions. This was the first non-betting sponsorship agreement for the coverage across the channel.
Spark Foundry worked in tandem with the creative agency to develop specific creative that stopped smokers in their tracks and caused them to pay attention. By focusing the creative execution on both humour and empathy it enabled the team to not only reach their audience with our message but to cut through.
This sponsorship delivered 28% reach to men 15+.
- Virgin Media League of Ireland Whistle Break
Off the back of growing crowds, online engagement and noise around the League of Ireland Virgin Media agreed a 3-year deal to show 36 games a season (one per week) across the league in what was the first major TV deal in the League’s history. This represented a further opportunity to reach the priority male audience across a free to air channel on a weekly basis. Aligned to theh execution across Premier Sports the wanted to maximise the impact of their ads by ensuring they showed up in moments of maximum attention.To ensure this Spark Foundry bought the more premium Solus whistle break meaning the ad was played in the 30 seconds just before kick-off showing the lead campaign message.
The AV strategy was supplemented with a multi-channel approach spanning Radio, OOH and Digital audio to ensure the campaign landed in multiple touchpoints all phased aligned to our AV strategy.
Search, Social and Display ran always on to ensure all intent and demand from broader media channels was capitalised on.
The Results
The challenge for this campaign is unique to others as they are not selling a product but are trying shift behaviours and habits that are part of smokers lives.
- Anchor messaging to “Take Back Control” and the 28-day milestone
Through ad tracking research in the wave from October 2025, unaided ad recall reached 69% compared to 57% in November 2024. For context the HSE standard benchmark across all campaigns for this metric is 43%.
- Drive measurable engagement with HSE quit services.
Quit signups increased by 7% in 2025 versus 2024 This was the 4th successive year of growth and aligned to increased targets and coming off an already high success rate.
Web Traffic increased by 2% year on year.
- Drive Meaningful Reach to MC2DE audiences
As part of the Premier Sport sponsorship to understand the effectiveness the team conducted a standalone piece of research on the sponsorship in November 2025. With the below key findings emphasising that the sponsorship places the campaign directly within a media property that strongly overlaps with its highest-priority smoking demographic, driving meaningful reach and most importantly cut through and receptiveness of message.
- 58% of smokers aware of Quit.ie now feel more positive about the experience.
- 80% of smokers say the ad makes them consider quitting.
- 1 in 2 have cut down smoking since exposure.
- 27% plan to stop for 28 days.
- 20% visited QUIT.ie and signed up for a plan.
The Premier Sports sponsorship except for paid social was the only space where the team promoted the Nicotine Replacement Therapy message. .
They saw the impact of the sponsorship on usage of Nicotine Replacement therapy with peak usage as a means of quitting.
Credits
Brand:
HSE QUIT
Media Agency:
Spark Foundry, Part of Core.
Award:
TAMI Awards Shortlist of Best TV Strategy at the 2026 TAMI Awards