Going global!

Last weekend New York based anti-tobacco industry youth advocacy group Reality Check held a two day event at Niagara Falls to celebrate the International Week of Action Against Smoking in Movies in conjunction with some Canadian youth groups who met across the border in Niagara falls Canada. 

On Saturday the groups came together with another youth advocacy group from Nigeria and invited D-MYST to take part in an international Skype conference call where each group spoke about the campaigning that they had done in their country regarding smoking in movies and D-MYST shared their SmokeOff campaign and the activity they have carried out in Liverpool with regards to smoking in the media.

It was a really great and unique opportunity for D-MYST to showcase their work internationally to other like minded young people and of great interest to hear what other groups are planning around the world!

We are so excited as we have been asked to take part in an international social media party this weekend.

There is a two day event to be held at Niagara Falls to celebrate the International Week of Action Against Smoking in Youth Rated Movies in conjunction with some American and Canadian youth groups who will be meeting across the border in Niagara falls Canada.  We are going to take part in an international SKYPE conference call with the young people from Canada, US, and also Nigeria to do a joint activity together via the call.   

It is a great way to link in with other like minded groups across the world and we are looking forward to sharing ideas meeting new friends!

Launch of our new shisha campaign

Today we launched our new shisha campaign in Liverpool City Centre to raise awareness of the dangers of smoking shisha.

Smoking flavoured shisha tobacco using Hookah waterpipes has become increasingly popular in Liverpool.  It's also particularly prevalent in middle eastern communities where it is a traditional past time.

However many people don't realise that smoking flavoured shisha in a waterpipe is harmful at all, but shisha is a tobacco, it does contain nicotine and it's extremely harmful to health potentially leading to everything from heart disease to cancer. Smoking shisha with a Hookah pipe is about 100 times more harmful than one cigarette.

Hookah pipes are also known to carry additional risks as the mouthpieces aren't cleaned often and as a result users can catch the like of herpes and tuberculosis simply buy using a waterpipe.

Hookah pipes and smoking shisha has become particularly popular in the Liverpool night scene and bar culture, however smoking shisha is illegal in enclosed or substantially enclosed public spaces and if caught you can face a fine of between £50 and £200.

Today was great as lots of people came over to talk to us and many didn't realise the dangers of smoking shisha. Lots of parents and their children were very interested in our literature!

We have so much planned for 2015 and held our first meeting of the year last week!

We have began planning our first campaign of the year that we will be launching in February half term in Liverpool City Centre so we are so we are really busy making sure everything is in place or that!

We are also working on a really exciting project that will put Liverpool on the map for their innovative work with young people! The project is in the really early stages at the moment but we hope to be able to share some details about it with you soon!

Happy New Year!

2014 was a really busy year for us that saw not only the taking of our SmokeOff campaign to the Coronation Street and Eastenders HQs but also the launch of our SmokeFree Cars campaign in Liverpool City Centre in October.

Our SmokeFree cars campaign highlights the dangers of smoking with children in the car as around 185,000 children are exposed to cigarette smoke in their family cars 'every day or on most days'. Children have smaller lungs, faster breathing rates and less developed immune systems, which makes them more susceptible to respiratory and ear infections triggered by smoking. In the confined space of a car, smoke density can build up very quickly to dangerous levels, even with the window open.

As well as writing our campaign literature and designing our campaign creative we also wrote and recorded our own radio infomercial that was played throughout half term on Radio City!

2015 is going to be another busy one starting with a new campaign in the pipeline that we will be launching in February!

We are really busy working on our new campaign that will be launched during October half term! Yesterday afternoon we spent some time in the Radio City recording studios as we recorded some voice-overs for our campaign infomercial! We are really looking forward to hearing the finished version!

Best of luck to our lovely Maia who will be representing D-MYST at the Children's Right Conference in Brussels on Monday! 

Maia will be giving a short presentation about D-MYST and speaking about how the tobacco industry targets young people to take up smoking with their marketing practices, how young people are being targeted, and how effective marketing practices are in influencing the consumption preferences and purchase requests of young people. Maia will also be taking part in roundtable discussions!

We look forward to seeing the photos!

We took an exciting trip to London on Saturday to visit the BBC HQ and deliver our 10,000 postcards signed by the people of Liverpool in favour of our SmokeOff campaign. 10,000 postcards is a lot to fit on a train and carry around London, but totally worth it to make a difference!


When we got to the BBC HQ each bag of postcards (there were 16 of them) had to be labelled and x-rayed! It took a long time...! We now await a response from the Executive Producer of Eastenders to see what he thinks about the support for our campaign and if he thinks there is editorial justification for all the smoking scenes in Eastenders.


We are now working really hard on our new campaign that we will be launching in October half term!

On Friday we headed to Manchester to deliver our SmokeOff signed postcards to the offices of Coronation Street! Just over 10,000 of them were taken to Media City along with a covering letter asking producers to justify the amount of smoking shown before the watershed.


We also got ourselves onto the famous cobbles of Coronation Street and had our pictures taken outside of the country's most famous pub!


We are currently awaiting a response from the producers and will update you when we have more news.


This week we shall be taking the remainder of the signed postcard to Eastenders....!

This has been such a busy summer for us! We are right in the middle of planning our new campaign that will be launched in the autumn. We have been getting together as much as possible and have now got our new logo ready to go, have been working on some radio activity and have been writing our campaign literature. As part of the new campaign we carried out some vox pops in Liverpool City Centre last week to ask people about the new campaign subject matter (that will be revealed soon) and it was great to see that most people have an opinion that is similar ours!

On Friday we are going to take a trip to Manchester to deliver the postcards that we collected in support of our Smokeoff Campaign. We have 10,000 postcards signed by the public in favour of Coronation Street and Eastenders removing smoking images before the watershed. We shall be taking these, along with a letter explaining why we chose to collect the postcards and what the campaign is about, to Granada in the hope that Coronation Street and Granada TV will think about what the impact that smoking imagery can have on young people.

We had a great meeting together yesterday and have so much going on over the summer! We have chosen the launch date for our new campaign which will be at the end of September so we will be spending the summer writing copy for our campaign material, working with local radio to write, produce and record our own infomercial, working with designers to make sure our new campaign logo is perfect and organising the actual launch that will take place in Liverpool City Centre!

Keep your eyes peeled on Tueday 19th August when we will be taking to the streets to chat to the public and get some vox pops about their opinions or our new campaign... All will be revealed soon!

After spending the past couple of months revising and sitting exams D-MYST had our first meeting of the summer yesterday to discuss our new campaign that we will be launching in Liverpool City Centre in September! The next few weeks are going to be really busy for us as we plan our campaign strategy, design our new campaign logo, discuss how to promote it and organise the launch!

As well as this D-MYST will also be sharing the impact that our SmokeOff campaign had with the public in regards to television shows that show smoking before the watershed. We had over 10,000 postcards signed in favour of no smoking on television shows before the watershed, especially in prime time viewing shows such as Coronation Street and Eastenders. Keep a look out for what D-MYST did next regarding this issue...!

D-MYST are off to New Zealand!!

Congratulations to our lovely member Katie who has been selected to visit New Zealand on behalf of D-MYST and demonstrate how successful we are!! Katie is so excited to head off on her travels and the rest of the group have some fun ideas for videos to send with her so we can all be there in spirit! Katie has already had a Skype conversation with a couple of the students that will be hosting her trip and they have already shared some interesting ideas for their programme! Watch this space for updates on her trip - Katie will be keeping a diary of her adventures and sharing them with us all!!

The official launch of our Smokeoff campaign went really well on Saturday! We teamed up with a fantastic entertainment act - 'faces of dicso' who helped to promote our campaign and remove smoking from TV shows such as Coronation Street and Eastenders. We also had a face in the hole attraction which was hugely popular with you people and children alike. Look out for photos on Twitter, facebook and our new instagram account @d_myst_uk - the best photo will win a £50 shopping voucher!! The day was a huge success and to add to all the fun we collected a further 1,000 signatures in support of our campaign!

We had an exciting meeting this evening! We spent our time going over the final plans for the official launch of our Smoke-off campaign! We have an exciting day planned on Saturday 19th March and we are hoping to get as many members of the public involved! Keep an eye out for us and all the special surprises we have planned and if you see us please come over to say hello and help us in our task to take smoking out of coronation street and eastenders!

Today we had a fun meeting storyboarding some ideas for videos. We have come up with some exciting ideas for an animation style video based on the members of D-MYST the agency. Watch this space for the next You Tube sensation! We then moved on to talk about the launch of the Smoke Off campaign! We have some very exciting plans that we hope to put in place! The launch of the Smoke-Off campaign will be on Saturday 19th October in Liverpool City Centre! Make sure you come and say hello!

We had a great meeting this weekend continuing our work on the shisha awareness campaign! We started the meeting by discussing the trip to New Zealand in March next year and the amazing opportunities a lucky member of D-MYST will have when they are there! We discussed the results of the shisha questionnaires we had completed and decided to have a fun creative session designing the information board and vinyl education matt that will be used in schools and at events across Liverpool! If you see our shisha board make sure you come over and say hello! Over lunch we talked about creating a new film for D-MYST and began to story board some ideas! This will be filmed during our next meeting in a few weeks time so watch this space!

Today we took to the streets of Liverpool to gather research on shisha smoking. We asked the public various questions to gather their opinion on shisha and its health effects. It was a great opportunity to hand out our shisha fact card and educate people on how harmful smoking shisha is. We will be out and about in different areas of Liverpool over the next few weeks so keep an eye out for us and feel free to head over and help us with our research!

Our meeting today started off with great news! Our proposal for a campaign around shisha awareness has been accepted and so we started work straight away! As part of the shisha campaign we need to understand what the general public know about shisha and its health risks! During the meeting we brainstormed some ideas on how to collect this information and decided that creating a survey for the public to complete would be the best idea! Look out for us around Liverpool next week and help us with our research by taking part in our survey! We have also been out and about this week collecting signatures in support of our latest SmokeOff campaign, targeting TV shows directly in a bid to take smoking off pre-watershed television! We have had some fantastic support from the people of Liverpool so far. If you see us at an event near you please come and say hi!

We had a great meeting outside in the sun on Saturday and planned our summer activity! Not only will be launching the second phase of our SmokeOff campaign, targeting TV shows directly, we have also written a proposal for a second summer campaign that we hope to carry out! It is always fun writing a proposal and putting all of our ideas down, but then we have to present it around the boardroom table and that part is always a bit nerve-wracking! Hopefully within the next couple of weeks we will be able to promote our new summer campaign! Look out for us around Liverpool over the next couple of months and come and say hi!