Welcome back to the Better Health Stoptober campaign!

Today should mark the start of Stoptober, the annual smoking cessation campaign now in its tenth year.

However, according to the Stoptober 2020 Campaign Evaluation, last year's event ran from September 21 to October 18.

The report was published by Public Health England a couple of weeks ago and caught me by surprise. (Thanks to Geoff Vann for bringing it to my attention.)

As readers may recall, for several years I repeatedly pushed PHE to publish their annual campaign evaluation – sometimes by submitting FOI requests – and repeatedly the report was published but only after the start of the subsequent campaign and sometimes not until the end of that campaign.

For example, the Stoptober 2016 evaluation report wasn't published until October 26, 2017, at the very end of Stoptober 2017. (See 'At last! The 2016 campaign evaluation report'.)

This, to me, made a mockery of the process because surely a campaign report should be published at least six months in advance of the next campaign because how else can you learn from the previous year's experience?

It doesn't mean of course that the data wasn't available to PHE long before the subsequent campaign but publishing the report during or towards the end of the next campaign did seem a bit odd, almost as if they were attempting to bury it.

After all, why would the media be interested in a report published during or after the subsequent campaign?

In truth the Stoptober campaign reports rarely if ever include anything of real interest. Invariably they read like a weak attempt to justify the continued use of taxpayers' money (approximately £1 million a year, down from £3.1 million in 2015) on a marketing campaign that, in my opinion, delivers very little in terms of smoking cessation.

For example, 'Since 2012, Stoptober has driven over 2.3 million quit attempts' (or an average of 255,000 each year).

This estimate is based on something called 'Sandtable modelling' but when it comes to the number of smokers who have actually quit as a result of Stoptober the evaluators are unable to come up with any figure, not even an estimate.

Instead we get all sorts of blurb concerning 'key performance indicators and targets' most of which seem to relate to 'reported quit attempts', 'reported sustained quit attempts' and 'positive claimed action taken'.

In other words, self-reporting.

The number one KPI seems to be campaign and brand recognition and after nine years (2012-2020) it seems that campaign awareness is in decline with a target of 45-49% slipping to 35% in 2020.

This won't surprise readers of this blog because I wrote about 'campaign recognition' last year. In short, if social media was any guide, it seemed that many people thought Stoptober was alcohol-related.

You could argue that this was win-win for public health because the campaign was hitting two birds with one stone. Nevertheless, once a campaign loses brand recognition it quickly loses relevance.

To be fair, even before Stoptober 2020 PHE did appear to recognise that the Stoptober brand was getting tired, hence the decision to bring it under 'the new umbrella brand Better Health ... it needed to feel fresh, exciting and part of the wider Better Health initiative'.

This however presented a problem because 'the Stoptober brand became recessive to the new Better Health brand'. Nevertheless:

Whilst we do have to bear in mind how difficult it was to break through in the pandemic media landscape, we will continue to build both the Better Health brand and the association with smoking cessation and Stoptober over time, as well as looking to make more of the Stoptober brand in 2021.

Thereafter the 2020 evaluation report concludes ... well, you can read it for yourself if you're interested (go to page ten).

Like the rest of the report it clings desperately to the notion that 'Stoptober continues to effectively drive smokers to make a quit attempt ... with 4% reporting that they were still not smoking at 4 weeks'.

No mention however of how many were still not smoking after four months or more.

No mention either of what (if any) smoking cessation aid these would-be quitters had used, which might have been useful.

For example, the NHS website lists four 'Stop smoking treatments': nicotine replacement therapy (NRT), Varenicline (Champix), Bupropion (Zyban), and e-cigarettes.

None of these 'treatments' (let alone cold turkey/willpower) are mentioned in the 2020 Stoptober evaluation report which seems a missed opportunity to me.

But as I've already mentioned, the most important thing when evaluating Stoptober seems to be brand recognition. And that seems to be falling.

PS. Public Heath England was formally abolished last night. Like many people I won't be shedding any tears for what was described as an "executive agency of the Department of Health and Social Care".

Sadly I'm no more optimistic about its replacement, the inelegantly named Office for Health Improvement & Disparities, which will be staffed by many of the people who worked for PHE so the nanny state mindset is unlikely to change.

In the meantime, seeing the way some of them have been congratulating one another on PHE's response to the pandemic, I would suggest that a period of self-reflection might be in order.

In my opinion, some are lucky to be still in a job.