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Field Reports Blog: Thanksgiving in Hanoi

Editing ads in the production studio


Tom (center) with in-country partners, at WHO's Vietnam headquarters


Vietnamese pho noodles for Thanksgiving


Hanoi's Temple of Literature is smoke-free

WLF has been working all year with partners in Vietnam to develop a national mass media campaign to generate support for national tobacco control policies and legislation. We arranged our third trip of the year to Hanoi for late November, with the goal of making significant progress on the campaign and beginning plans for a press launch to reveal the ads and announce the smoke-free policy they support.

The American Thanksgiving holiday (which took place the Thursday of our trip) was a distant thought as we faced a week packed with meetings and looked forward to reconnecting with our governmental and NGO partners. Finally in the same time zone and able to take meetings in-person, we were able to accomplish an astonishing amount of work that week.

During the trip we worked with our production agency to make final edits to the campaign's two TV ads and to develop related poster concepts to test in front of focus groups. Our research agency rallied that weekend and was able to conduct a quickie message-testing study of the posters, so we could determine which concepts to use for the campaign. We also met with a media buyer, who presented an initial plan to buy air time for the ads across Vietnam. Then we interviewed four PR agencies and selected one to conduct media relations for our campaign launch, and we worked with the agency and our partners to begin planning logistics for the event.

Best of all, our partners were involved in every meeting along the way, allowing us to glean valuable cultural context from them and for them to be more hands-on in the process of developing a best-practice mass media campaign. We had some terrific discussions and exchanges of knowledge, and we left Hanoi with energy renewed and more confidence in our work than ever before.

The Vietnamese "Cigarettes are Eating You Alive" campaign launches in mid-December of 2009.