Campaign against cigarettes traffic, signed by Romanian pastel

Cristina Blanaru Creativity

Romanian communication agency pastel, faracontrabanda.ro and Euromonitor Business Consulting Services, with support from JTI Romania, organized a first campaign against cigarettes trafficking in North-Western Romania. The campaign took place between November 2013 – March 2014 and aimed to inform population related to the less publicly known aspects of cigarettes trafficking.

The main message of the campaign was “Did you make your first million?  From your money, traffickers already did! Don’t support cigarettes trafficking” and tried to make public aware of the fact that, when buying trafficked cigarettes, they actually support organized crime.

The profit made by a trafficker from a truck of smokes is of Euro 1M. People must understand that, although it might seem they made a good deal initially, the deal favors the traffickers that are getting rich on their expense. Authorities make significant efforts to destabilize trafficking networks, but it is important for the public to be informed and educated

Ioana Mucenic,

Managing Partner pastel.

pastel aimed for campaign’s message to reach to over 1M people from Romanian cities Satu Mare, Bistrita, Cluj, Salaj, Bihor and Baia Mare and, for this, it opted for print and online media communication, outdoor and direct communication with adult smokers.

The campaign also saw partnerships closed with town halls, transport companies and labor agencies, but also with cab companies. With this help, the public was exposed to posters and were distributed over 115,000 flyers with campaign’s message. With support from 9 public institutions, over 1M unique regional viewers saw the message, the online banner was seen over 1M times and the message was communicated directly to 235,000 adult smokers.

Campaign’s flyers were made to simulate the RON 100 bill, with the visual of the campaign printed on one side.

On the online platform www.faracontrabanda.ro were posted the most important info from the campaign, including a video on the cigarettes trafficking in North-Western Romania.

pastel received the task to make this campaign following a pitch in which were involved more agencies.

pastel’s proposed concept proved to be the most suited one. The agency has a team formed from young and professional people, which immediately understood what’s needed so that contraband’s profoundly negative effects to be known at whole society’s level (…) We are happy that, together with pastel, managed to put together the first campaign in North-Western Romania against cigarettes contraband

Cristina Vasiloiu,

director Euromonitor Business Consulting Services.

This campaign is a project that stimulated our creativity. It needed an important and complex message, but, in the same time, simple and easy to understand by everyone. Through the effort of the entire team, through the selected strategy, we think we managed to make people curious and, in the end, to generate civic involvement

Mihaela Pipirig,

Project manager for the campaign within pastel.

Teams involved in the campaiugn

  • pastel – Campaign’s strategy was developed by Ioana Mucenic, with Mihaela Pipirig being in charge with account management. pastel’s creative team included Paul Cotor – fresh minded creative director,  Alex Ciobanu – young junior 3d designer, Lucian Rosu – highly accurate dtp, Ionela Toma – inspired senior copywriter and Claudia Popa – cheerful copywriter;
  • Euromonitor Business Consulting Services: Cristina Vasiloiu – CEO, Tania Roman
  • JTI: Gilda Lazar – Director Corporate Affairs & Communications, Moldova and Bulgaria, Armand Radu Tanase – Corporate Affairs Manager, Alice Taudor -Communications Manager and Razvan Oltean – Public Affairs Manager.