Source: The Sydney Morning Harald
Author: Ennis Cehic

Ads worse than zombie movies just make you want to turn the TV off.

QUIT Victoria has told us about the detrimental effects of smoking for years, and advertisers have focused on communicating to the public the risks. As such, we have seen ads that are so scary, so full of brutal detail, that you cannot stomach watching and want to turn off the television.

When the packaging got worse, smokers started begging retailers to give them the pack with the ”statistics” – the others were just too horrible to look at. From cut-up brains on a silver platter to X-rays of badly damaged lungs, to the camera view of the smoke literally going down one’s throat, the point was hammered home – smoking is very, very bad.

But recently, a new kind of anti-smoking ad is appearing on TV. It has no physical lungs in a surgeon’s hands, no brains cut up on the screen, no little kids crying at the airport and definitely no cancerous mouths staring at you. No, this is a fast-paced ad about a man who has been attempting to quit for a while and it portrays the difficult stages he goes through.

He quits, then he starts again, he quits and then he starts again, and at the end of the ad, he hasn’t had a cigarette for more than three years.

I watched the ad and felt something tingle in my stomach. I smiled and wanted to see it again. I wanted to see it again because that tingle was a mixture of disbelief and hope What? No cut up brains? No lungs? No misery? This smoking ad is positive! It’s not shoving anything down my throat. I haven’t turned the TV off to eat my beef burger in peace. I was gobsmacked.

A recent article in B&T, an advertising industry magazine, argued that advertisers are out of touch with their target audience, that they don’t understand the ”average Joe” on the streets. It seems to me that Quit Victoria has done its research, or its advertising agency has, and realised that a decade of educational advertising was enough. Repetition proves a point, but let’s not bore people. Maybe it realised that many people switch off the TV when a Quit ad comes on. I can imagine them in their boardroom: ”I think it’s time we switched the message. This is getting more and more scary, our ads are worse than some zombie movies.”

As I smoker, I am thoroughly aware that smoking is harmful, that one day I might die from it. I knew this before I smoked. The world was aware of this when they got their facts right in the 1950s. So why do I continue to smoke? Well, I don’t know. My answer is always, I just enjoy it, full stop. It’s a stupid answer and a stupid reason.

But in the past decade, the educational advertisements that portrayed the physical harm of smoking did not make me quit. They reminded me often to think about my life, they showed me what it does to my body and how it kills me slowly. It made me think, it made me reconsider, but, at the end of the day, it did not make me give up.

My girlfriend has recently stopped smoking, just went cold turkey. Hasn’t had a cigarette in six weeks. We saw the ad one night while watching TV and after it ended she smiled and said: ”Cool, that’s me. I haven’t had a cigarette in six weeks!”

The new campaign gives us hope. It shows the trials and tribulations of trying to quit. It shows smokers in a different light altogether, not alien and ignorant of the hazards, but human after all.

People need to know that sometimes the reasons for doing things are often inexplicable, and that smokers know, just like drug fiends know, that it is bad for us.

Why we keep doing it, well, consider it the intrinsic human stupidity that makes us do things. It’s been around since people started to philosophise. As Einstein said: ”Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.” It explains a lot about human foolishness.

Ennis Cehic works in the advertising industry.