• by Karl Greenberg , July 14, 2008

The American Legacy Foundation's "truth" campaign, aimed at preventing kids from lighting up, is taking a shot a viral marketing.

The campaign "ReMix" involves DJs and bands grabbing the song-and-dance tunes from the Foundation's six-month old "Sunny Side" campaign and creating hip-hop, house and alt-rock music from them.

The effort features bands like Cobra Starship, Diplo, Kaskade, Mix Master Mike and others re-mixing the songs that -- in the TV spots -- have a lot more in common with Ziegfeld Follies than, say, Nickelback. The songs are core elements of the Foundation's five ironic "Sunny Side" TV spots that parody the evils of smoking by pointing out the "hidden positives."

The latest of the TV ads, which launched last week, focuses on chemicals in cigarettes. The spot, like its predecessors, opens outside of a tobacco company with two young adults setting jugs labeled "benzene, arsenic, cyanide" on a table. One teen suggests that "with so many poisons in cigarettes, it's like these tobacco companies hate us or something." The other youth says it's actually "tough love." The two are then joined by a pair of tough-looking cupids, and the four break into a song and dance routine extolling the many ways Big Tobacco shows its "Tough Love" to smokers. Joining in the musical interlude are people in wheelchairs, hooked up to respirators.

The songs remixed from the ads launched on thetruth.com/remix and on truth pages on MySpace, Facebook, Hi5, and others. The songs will also be in rotation on music Web sites like Pandora, Imeem, iLike, Spin.com, and iTunes.

CD's will be distributed at all stops on The Truth summer tour, a nationwide grassroots outreach effort covering 60 cities in 30 different states. The tour also hits events like Vans Warped Tour, and the Tony Hawk Boom Boom HuckJam. Anyone who buys tickets to the Vans tour through Ticketmaster.com will be offered a free download from the ReMix CD starting in late July.

Nicole Dorrler, senior director of marketing at the American Legacy Foundation says the effort is meant to get the campaign's message to kids without using a megaphone.

"Big tobacco isn't doing traditional media buys, but more [underground] approaches to their targeted audience the same way; so we are countering the approach with our own non-traditional campaign."

The music will also be in cinemas playing under static ads before feature presentations; on radio stations - not as ads, but in actual play lists; and on TV. She says the Foundation created long-form video content - features about the artists re-mixing the Sunny Side music, and interviews - that will run in interstitials between other programming on channels like Fuse and VH1.

The ReMix Web site, compact disc packaging and Mobile Widget design are by the Foundation's creative agency for the Truth campaign, Boston-based Arnold Worldwide. The ReMix music was produced in conjunction with Rock River Music.