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Sanitized Advertising Not For Your Protection
By Julie | March 26, 2008
Some time back, when the big lawsuits were filed and won against Big Tobacco, ads about how bad smoking really is were supposed to get worse - messier, scarier, truer.
Years later, we now know that this didn’t happen. Whether it’s just squeamishness by creators of PSAs, influence by tobacco companies, or squeamishness by broadcasting companies, I can’t tell you.
When I see ads on TV about smoking cessation, they’re very clean - dude in his doctor’s office, with a tagline about ‘if you don’t plan to quit, what are you planning?,’ dude in a hospital bed watching TV and looking very well-fed despite the oxygen tube. For a while, they did some ads with people who had emphysema filmed in grainy, art-school black-and-white, but the people in the ads were still pretty lucid, obviously.
End stage lung cancer is pretty horrific. Really, most end-stage cancers, in which the cancer has gone metastatic and is spreading via blood or lymph, is horrific. This is not depicted in advertising or in media. They dodge the true situation.
Almost anything an oncology ward, a hospice, or an information provider will give you on end-stage treatment and issues, even without pictures, are a lot more accurate. Dementia? Coma? Pain? Yes. Death-rattle breathing punctuated by the cold suck of an oxygen machine? Yes. Massive weight loss, except where visible tumors jut out of the body? Yes.
You want to motivate people to quit? Show them that when cancer goes end-stage, they will lose their mind, they will dehydrate and be unable to eat, they will not recognize their own children, and they will die choking on a combination of phlegm and tumor. Show them pictures or film. Then break their fingers and slap nicotine patches on their foreheads.
Put it on TV. Put it in ads. Write it into scripts, because even if the cancer doesn’t spread into lymph, organ shut-down is equally horrifying. No one looks well-fed and rosy-cheeked in end-stage cancer.
Topics: advertising, rant, the road to hell, traditional media |
