What CDC's Tips From Former Smokers Campaign Has Achieved

CDC graphic, citing Preventing Chronic Disease.

The campaign

CDC's Tips From Former Smokers (Tips) campaign features real people living with serious, long-term health effects of smoking and secondhand smoke, and family members who care for loved ones with smoking-related diseases or disabilities. More about the campaign.

Results

• Quitting: from 2012 to 2018, CDC estimates that more than 16.4 million people who smoke tried to quit, and about one million succeeded, because of Tips.
• Intentions: people who smoke and saw the ads were more likely to plan to quit within 30 days — and more so the more often they saw them.
• Staying quit: more exposure to the campaign was linked to lower odds of relapse.
• Lives and money: in 2012–2018, Tips helped prevent an estimated 129,000 early deaths and saved about $7.3 billion in smoking-related health care costs.
• Cost-effectiveness: one early death was prevented for every $3,800 spent, in a study that accounted for relapse, inflation, and advertising and evaluation costs.
• Quitline calls: each campaign brought an immediate, sustained surge in calls to 1-800-QUIT-NOW and visits to the campaign website — over two million extra calls in 2012–2023.

Impact of CDC's Tips From Former Smokers campaign, 2012–2018. CDC infographic (PDF).

Viewers respond, too: comments on CDC's social media have called the ads powerful and the most effective antismoking messages they had seen, thanked the participants for their courage, and wished a parent had seen them years earlier.

More: search CDC's Tips publications and evaluation results by topic, date and campaign year.

Want to quit? Call 1-800-QUIT-NOW.

Sources

Based on "Tips Impact and Results," Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; a work of the United States government in the public domain. Viewers' comments are paraphrased. Studies cited: Murphy-Hoefer and others, Preventing Chronic Disease (2020); Davis and others, Health Education & Behavior (2017); Davis and others, Journal of Smoking Cessation (2022); Shrestha and others, American Journal of Preventive Medicine (2021); Mann and others, Nicotine & Tobacco Research (2025).