Meet the 'Simon Fuller' of public health

Published on Thursday 4 October 2007 01:13

THE OPENING lines of Trainspotting - "Choose life, choose a job, choose a career..." - are among the most famous in movie history. Some movie fans may not realise Renton's famous rant was the nihilistic inversion of a Scottish anti-drugs campaign of 20 years ago, with the slogan "Choose Life, Not Drugs".

Martin Raymond, who worked on the original campaign as part of the Scottish Health Education Group, is wryly amused to have played such a role in Scottish movie history.

"I suppose it shows the impact on the culture - which is what we were trying to achieve," he says.

It's not the only occasion when Raymond, a teacher turned public health and marketing man, has had an impact on popular culture. As the head of public affairs for the Health Education Board for Scotland (HEBS) he was behind the anti smoking campaign "Think About It", which culminated in a government-engineered girl band doing well in the Scottish charts, making Raymond the Simon Fuller of public health.

Raymond was last month named as one of Scotland's top four marketers by an industry magazine. The others were: Angus Meldrum, who, as managing director of Tennent's, oversaw the creation of the T in the Park festival and the Tennent's Scottish Cup; Nigel Dugdale, who, with A G Barr, oversaw the development of the iconic Irn Bru and Irn Bru 32 advertising campaigns; and Chris Dempsey, former marketing supremo at the Scottish Executive, who oversaw ground-breaking public health campaigns on a range of issues including tackling domestic abuse.

Raymond believes it is significant both he and Dempsey were involved in public health. Inside the industry, many now believe there was a period during the 1980s and 1990s when Scotland was way ahead in terms of public health campaigns.

For Raymond the breakthrough came with the need to inform the public about the threat of Aids and HIV in the 1980s, which raised the stakes in health information.

He says: "There was a real sense of panic in Scotland at the time."

The notorious iceberg campaign and the introduction of needle exchanges were hugely controversial at the time, but marked a new willingness to take risks in public health campaigning.

Raymond says: "One of the things about advertising about health is that it's a real cultural barometer in that it reflects the time it's created for. It doesn't last very well."

The Choose Life campaign, which inspired Irvine Welsh to write the scene in Trainspotting, was vastly different from anti-drugs campaigns of the past in that it stressed the positives of abstinence rather than focusing on the negative effects of drugs.

"What we were trying to do was to do the opposite," Raymond says. "Instead of stressing the terrible downside of taking drugs, we tried to turn it around. Young people were taking drugs because they were bored and there was nothing going on, so it was all about doing other things that were risky - rather than taking drugs. We focused on things like music and dancing, things that were accessible."

The Choose Life slogan was already a buzz phrase of the 1980s, thanks to fashion designer Katharine Hamnett, who used it on her oversized slogan T-shirts. But using a buzzy slogan in a previously staid field of health education was something new.

Raymond's belief was that public health messages, to be effective, needed to be positive and inspiring rather than playing on doom and fear.

"The plan was to steal the best ideas from commercial advertising. Public health had always been about scaring people. We wanted to make something aspirational, to make people feel good about themselves."

In 1991, Raymond became the head of public affairs for HEBS. There he oversaw an integrated campaign to encourage Scots to give up smoking, which saw the introduction of Smokeline and the launch of the Blue Sticks campaign, and which led to Raymond becoming an unlikely pop svengali. He says: "We did a lot of research that looked at peer group pressure, which is one of the main reasons teenagers smoke."

The Blue Sticks campaign, which featured cartoon characters puffing on blue sticks, used humour to encourage youngsters to rebel against smoking.

Raymond believed teenagers were among the most sophisticated viewers of marketing and advertising, and government-sponsored advertising often misunderstood them.

While he prided himself on understanding his target audience, even Raymond was taken aback when the popularity of the Stinx girl band - the stars of an anti-smoking campaign that delivered its message to a Britney Spears-like soundtrack in a pop video.

"There we were, a government funded body making a pop video, but what made it work was a bit of intelligence. We started getting e-mails saying it's a good song where can we buy it. We were a bit wary but we released it and," he says, "it got to number two in Scotland."

These days, Raymond is at the helm of his own agency, Cloudline, where among other things he is advising the Serbian government on public health. He still can't quite believe how he became the man behind the world's first anti-smoking girl band.

"I still speak to people now who say they bought it and they learned to do the dance - and I wonder what impact it had. It's almost impossible to judge - but it goes quite deep. It's about changing the culture. When you think that now we have a ban on smoking in public places it shows you how much things have changed."