Pfizer will restart TV advertising for its Chantix anti-smoking drug on Sunday, nine months after voluntarily putting the campaign on hold as worries about a link between the medicine and suicidal thoughts and actions grew.


The spots run 90 seconds–30 seconds more than the ones Pfizer (nyse: PFE – news – people ) ran for just four months last year–and hew to the same narrative as the old one, using a race between a tortoise and a Belgian hare to dramatize the fact that quitting smoking that favors the slow and steady–and that Chantix can help.

Side effect information takes up 41 seconds of the advertisement, with about 20 seconds devoted to a warning that patients taking Chantix should stop taking it if they experience agitation, suicidal thoughts or suicidal behavior. Pfizer says the role of Chantix in those symptoms is “not known.”

“Some people think the drug has been withdrawn from the market,” says Veronique Cardon, team leader of U.S. marketing for Chantix. “More importantly, a lot of people haven’t heard of Chantix yet.”

The new campaign shows how pharmaceutical companies are trying to adapt the marketing of their products to a climate of hair-trigger concern over drug safety. But Pfizer faces other hurdles in launching Chantix, too. Its own communications to Wall Street before Chantix went on sale described the anti-smoking market as prone to dramatic sales spikes and stomach-heaving drops.

The drug’s success is particularly important as it tries to match the success of older medications like Lipitor, which loses patent protection in just three years. Pfizer shares have fallen 25% in 12 months.

Safety controversies only make that tougher. When ads are pulled because of new and serious side effects, some reappear in a longer form with more detail about the new risks, says Ruth Day, director of the Medical Cognition Laboratory at Duke University. This also happened with ads for Celebrex (also a Pfizer drug) after it was linked to an elevated risk of heart disease.