RESEARCH ARTICLE Open Access The impact of televised to

Tobacco control mass media campaigns have been shown to play a key role in encouraging smoking cessation among adults [1-5] and in reducing smoking prevalence [6]. In addition, there is growing evidence to suggest that campaigns featuring emotive or graphic content are more effective than those which do not [7-9]. While several studies have investigated youth recall of tobacco control advertising [10-13], only two to date have examined the impact of campaign content on recall among adults [14,15]. Both concluded that campaigns featuring graphic imagery or negative emotive content were more frequently recalled than those which did not. However, the first was based in Australia where the overwhelming majority of televised campaigns contain negative emotive content and graphic images [16,17] and the other was based on an internet survey rather than a representative sample of smokers