The clocks go back in the UK on October 26. So everyone gets an extra hour.
Smoking is known to shortens people’s lives, so M&C Saatchi Sydney seized the moment that happens once a year to remind smokers, as they turn their clocks back, that if they quit they will get extra years added to their lives.

The integrated campaign uses cigarettes to depict hands on a clock set at the time that all people living in the UK needed to reverse at the weekend, 2am on Sunday, October 26.

The message, ‘Tonight you get one hour back. Quit and you’ll get years back.’ replaces numbers on the clock face to be read anti clockwise to strengthen the ‘time back’ idea.

A carpe diem call to action drives people to the Quit UK website, quit.org.uk where they can type their age, when they started smoking and numbers of cigarettes smoked daily to calculate an estimate of how many years they would get back if they were to quit today.

The campaign went live in print in Britain’s mainstream newspapers. There are also out of home, online and social components in the week leading to the end of the UK’s daylight saving.

A giant digital billboard in the UK’s prime outdoor real estate, ‘Piccadilly One’ in London’s Piccadilly Circus went live from Saturday evening until the early hours of Sunday.

According to the calculator, the average 25-year-old male smoker in Britain who smokes 12 cigarettes a day and started smoking at 16 would get back five years of life if he quit today,

“Think of all the things you could do in five years. There’s no time like the present to quit the deadly habit of smoking. It was a genius idea from the guys at M&C Saatchi Sydney to link quitting with the end of Daylight Savings. It’s an event that effects everyone living in the UK, obviously including every smoker, so it’s enabled us to get enormous awareness and traction,” QUIT chief executive officer, Glyn McIntosh stated.

“It’s great that people can go to the website, punch in their details and get an estimated figure – the time of their life – they would get back if they were to quit smoking today. It’s such a compelling, tactile way to show people the ultimate benefit of not smoking.”

M&C Saatchi Sydney creative director, Ant Melder, added, “It was fun to work on a campaign that involved time travel”.

“The clocks going back is always seen as something of a negative, after all it signals the start of winter. But the reality is that everyone gets an hour back; an extra hour to sleep in, to play with your kids, to do whatever you want, It was a brutally simple thought to link that idea to the time smokers would get back to do all those things if they quit their deadly habit.”

Creative credits:

Agency:                                         M&C Saatchi Sydney
Executive creative director:       Ben Welsh
Cheif executive officer:              Jaimes Leggett
Creative director:                        Ant Melder
Senior art director:                     Brian Jefferson
Senior copywriter:                       Ben Stainlay

Executive producer
– print & art buying:                 Trent Henderson
Production coordinator:         Pearla Ordillo
Finished artist/typographer:  Mick Tonello
Photographer:                          Jeremy Hudson
Photography assistant:           Tom Antcliff

Retouching:                               Cream Studios
Digital design director:            Richard Smith
Senior digital designer:            Chi Yusuf
Motion graphics designer:       Cameron Nash
Senior digital producer:            Ant Harca
Digital producer:        Michelle Vuong
Web developers:        Roger Chapman , Ticiana Andrade & Stuart O’Connell