Life didn`t seem to hold many career options for women when Kathleen Harty was growing up on a farm near Blooming Prairie, in southeastern Minnesota. But the 49-year-old health education innovator is determined to make sure that today`s young women know they have one option in particular, the choice not to smoke.
Women 18 to 21 are the target of a new television and radio campaign launched by Harty, manager of the Minnesota Department of Health`s Section on Nonsmoking and Health, and produced by a Minneapolis advertising agency.
Under her leadership, Minnesota was the first state to use revenue raised from taxes on cigarette sales to fund anti-tobacco campaigns on radio and television.
The first state-funded ads were targeted at teenagers and aired in 1986;
the newest are intended to reach young women and are running this month in Minnesota.
Harty believes that messages, about a significant health problem, delivered via advertising can influence behavior and, eventually, alter social norms.
”Most people don`t really understand how powerful the (advertising)
media can be,” she says. ”They see it as pretty frivolous.” Harty refuses to take the traditional class-and-pamphlet approach to convincing adults to quit smoking. Instead, she has taken prevention messages first to kids-on their headsets and in front of their TV screens-and now to women, also via radio and TV.
The messages she delivers, while laced with humor, hit hard. In one TV commercial, a comely woman on a cigarette billboard comes alive to put out her cigarette on the bald head of a tobacco-industry executive. In another, the wind blows off the billboard`s letters, changing the message from ”Women are making the rush to rich flavor” to ”Women are making us rich.”
Well aware of her efforts, the Tobacco Institute, an industry lobbying group, in Washington D.C., objects not only to the content of these commercials but also to the use of tax dollars on a health problem that already is acknowledged and understood.
”It`s an unfortunate misuse of public funds,” spokesman Thomas Lauria says of the ad campaign. ”To say that additional information needs to be given to women is patronizing. There is not a single person over the age of 8 who doesn`t know the dangers associated with smoking. One has to ask whether money is being well-spent reminding people, especially when there is a dearth of information about AIDS and other problems,” he says.
Minnesota is spending $321,000 to produce and air the radio and TV ads within the state, and other states may obtain the broadcast materials for the small cost of copying the video and audio tapes.
A previous commercial, aimed at teens and featuring animals smoking cigarettes, has aired in states including New York, Florida, Oregon, Arkansas, Pennsylvania and Texas, and outside the United States in Israel, Colombia and Hong Kong.
So far, the ad message seems to be getting through to its intended target.
Although Harty admits that not all of the success can be attributed to the broadcast campaign, Minnesota Department of Health statistics show that adult smoking rates dropped from 29 percent to 21 percent between 1986, when the program was first implemented, and 1989; smoking rates among ninth-graders dropped from 16 to 14 percent between 1986 and 1990. (The department`s statistics say 57 percent of teens who smoke try cigarettes before they reach the 7th grade.)
For Harty, the success represents the culmination of a lifetime spent trying to marry two interests-health care and communication-and move beyond the limited opportunities she saw for women while coming of age in the `50s.
”I didn`t want to be a teacher or nurse,” she says.
In the late `60s, Harty sold her car to raise $400 for a one-way trip to Europe.
It was the first of many unusual risks she would take, and it nurtured a budding social consciousness. She spent 14 months working at a snack bar in Berlin, hitchhiking 6,000 miles, learning German and getting involved in antiwar activism. She returned to Minneapolis in 1968 to complete an undergraduate degree in communication and counseling at Metro State University in 1975, reflecting her growing interest in behavioral psychology. She also received a master`s from the College of St. Thomas, St. Paul, in health education.
”That was where everything came together,” she says. ”I wanted to do health education, but not the classroom kinds of things.” She`d seen the need to educate hospital patients about their diseases to reduce their anxiety, but thought it made more sense to focus on preventing health problems in the first place.
”If they got the information ahead of time, they wouldn`t be so unhealthy later in life.”
Harty got the chance to combine health education and communications when she joined the Minnesota Department of Health in 1979.
Based on the success of her initial project-introducing a health education program for state workers-Harty was tabbed by the state`s first female, non-physician health commissioner, Sister Mary Madonna Ashton, to head Minnesota`s first state-funded prevention initiative.
Nine state health problems were identified, and smoking was chosen as the first one to attack ”because it had the biggest impact on the health and welfare of people and on the economic well-being of the state,” Harty says.
State research showed that direct medical care costs attributable to smoking were nearly $375 million, or $91 a person; indirect costs of lost income attributable to premature death were estimated at $303 million.
Harty worked with a 20-person committee of civic leaders, politicians and educators, spending nine months to draft proposed legislation that would fund research and publicity against smoking and to promote clean indoor air.
It was passed in special session by the Minnesota legislature in 1985.
”Our budget went from $40,000 to $1.6 million literally overnight,” she says. ”But nobody had ever done anything like (a broadcast campaign) before, and a lot of people were very nervous about it.”
Her first television effort, in 1986, was a $500,000 Smoke Free Generation T-shirt promotion aimed at teenagers. Borrowing a concept that originated in Sweden, and unsure how successful it might be in Minnesota, she ordered only 40,000 shirts as part of the giveaway.
”I could have given away 400,000,” she says. ”We got 4,000 calls a day.”
She worked with advertising agencies to develop other successful campaigns, using federal and state data plus information gathered from focus groups. The most recent campaign, for example, evolved from Centers for Disease Control statistics that say nearly 40 percent of women who smoke don`t begin smoking until age 18. In focus groups, young women laid some of the blame for starting to smoke on tobacco company advertising and said they were tired of being manipulated by the ads.
”There is nothing we`re saying that women haven`t said to us,” Harty says. ”One thing we`ve really learned is that you cannot be too blatant or too subtle. You have to find the right salient message.”
She is convinced that those messages, communicated in a creative way, work to change people`s behavior and create new social norms.
”It takes a long time, but it can be done,” she says.
Her devotion to the cause is unusual for a client, say advertising agency executives at Martin/Williams, who have helped her create commercials since 1988. They say they are used to receiving late-night calls when she discovers a new piece of anti-smoking evidence or has a new idea.
”It`s a real union of drive and enthusiasm,” says account supervisor Eric Simon. Her vision, he says, is ”crystal clear, and she`s going to accomplish it, one way or another.”
