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How Tobacco Company "Anti-Smoking" Ads Appeal to Teens [ by Carrie McLaren ]
As Adweek pointed out, Philip Morris is spending far more on advertising its charitable efforts (the $100 million) than on the charitable efforts themselves ($60 million). Lorillard Tobacco, makers of Newport cigarettes, has recently launched its own campaign: Tobacco is whacko if you're a teen. As part of the settlement reached by Big Tobacco and state attorneys general in 1997, Lorillard et al. must spend $500 million a year on anti-tobacco advertising. The whacko campaign is presumably an attempt to speak to teens in their own language. But would anyone under eighteen take advice from someone who used the word whacko? Being out of touch with high school jargon, I searched Geocities homepages to see how common particular slang words are. I've no clue how many Geocities users are under eighteen, so the methodology needs some work. Nevertheless: stupid brought up 383,512 hits; crap 168,655; and whacko a lowly 6,568, including usages such as Mousty's Wacko Petz, Ask Wacko and Wacko's Wacky World. Unless the advertising geniuses behind the campaign are themselves whacko, surely they knew these ads wouldn't work. The marketers at Lorillard are clearly less interested in curbing teen smoking than in appearing to do so. Whacko ads appear in magazines such as Teen People and Seventeen but also Spin, where they stand out like a sore thumb amid pierced hipsters and Diesel-inspired surrealists. As any market researcher could tell you, Spin's audience would ignore anything labeled for a teen. Lorillard's strategy, which is far more subtle than Philip Morris's, is made clear in Advertising Age's rave review. Columnist Bob Garfield calls it as categorical a denunciation as you could ever wish for. Sure, if you're a parent or over forty, that's the impression Lorillard is aiming for. Lorillard's true target audience is closer to Garfield's age than teenagers'. Of course, tobacco is not the sole producer of dubious public service campaigns. The Ad Council was formed in 1942 to improve public opinion of advertising; to, in effect, advertise advertising. Thanks to its efforts, those of us growing up in the late '70s were raised to believe that America's environmental problems were due to litter, and the disappearance of greenlands to careless, fire-wielding picnickers. Social marketing campaigns tend to be concerned more with public relations than the purported cause. Still, there's no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater--at least not yet. Bob Garfield may consider Lorillard's the most resonant anti-tobacco campaign but two state-sponsored efforts prove him wrong. Question It (www.questionit.com) is the youth campaign launched by the Partership for a Healthy Mississippi; Truth (www.wholetruth.com) is the Florida equivalent. Unlike the youth campaigns produced by tobacco companies, the states don't pretend that talking down to the audience works. They recognize that smoking is an act of rebellion, and that kids are more inclined to start not in spite of anti-tobacco propaganda but because of it. Question It confronts teens with their own reactionary rebellion. The underlying message of the campaign is that, far from symbolizing freedom and adulthood, tobacco use is a form of obedience--obedience to tobacco companies. This is closer to the categorical denunciation some of us would hope for, and it is carried out using the sort of edgy graphics and unscripted dialogue you might find in a Reebok commercial. Or so says the press kit. I've only seen the website but was immediately won over by its poignant animation. The front page of the site leads off with a blood-sucking mosquito, dressed in a suit, who meets his end when his host smashes the creature in a pool of blood. Elsewhere on the site, Spin Doctors: How the Tobacco Industry Worms Their Way Into Your Head details tricks of the trade. Another section, Beat the Odds . . . How to Make $$$ When 11,000 of Your Customers Die Everyday, includes a game called Tease the Weasel. By answering tobacco-related trivia, players determine the fate of R.J., the resident corporate weasel. Answer wrong and R.J. gets another bag of money. Both Question It and the Truth campaigns turn the tables and target tobacco marketing . . . carefully, I might add, for the tobacco settlement forbids them from attacking tobacco companies directly. Television commercials produced by Truth's Florida ad agency Crispin Porter Bogusky show teens making crank calls to ad agencies and Hollywood execs. Another commercial rather brilliantly portrays the tobacco industry's dedicated search for a scientist offering the right (i.e. pro-tobacco) evidence. Watching these spots, the viewer is easily seduced by the confident cool of the young activists, all wholly likable, believable, real people types. And there are signs the campaign works. In Florida, the number of teens who said they were smokers dropped from 23.3% to 20.9%, about 31,000 fewer smokers, a year after the campaign launched. A subsequent survey found that the number of Florida middle schoolers who said they smoke dropped almost in half in just one year; smoking by high school students dropped 17%. That makes it the second year in a row that teen smoking has dropped dramatically in Florida. According to Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at UC San Francisco, this makes Truth the most effective effort to reduce teen smoking in the world. It also underlines the absurdity of trusting the tobacco companies--whose campaigns pale in comparison--to police themselves. Oddly, Florida governer Jeb Bush hasn't taken kindly to Truth; his administration withdrew funding for 2000. He couldn't kill it, though. Crispin Porter Bogusky was selected to launch the first national anti-youth smoking campaign. A new batch of Truth ads started appearing nationally in February. One of the ads featured hundreds of body bags piling up around the Philip Morris building; another showed teens ambushing Philip Morris personnel, Michael Moore-style, with a lie detector. Unfortunately, the tobacco industry bullied the American Legacy Foundation--the nonprofit set up with settlement money--into pulling the ads. Even if they hadn't, the chances for the ads running was unlikely: NBC, ABC and CBS had all rejected the initial storyboards submitted to the networks. Two subsequent Truth commericals were also canned and Philip Morris threatened to sue. The problem with these ads, apparently, is that they actually worked. Of course, positive propaganda is still propaganda, and its limits are clearly visible with Truth. The name alone serves as its own warning: from Pravda to Fundamentalist Christians to objectivist journalists, anyone claiming a monopoly on truth begs scrutiny. Levi's recent ad campaign was The Truth. So were last year's ex-gay testimonials, sponsored by Americans for Truth About Homosexuality and others. Well positioned though they be, Question It and Truth offer the most for their cause when they go beyond the language of advertising. After all, the same advertising industry behind selling cigarettes is behind unselling them. Consciously questioning this authority will get teens farther in the long run than catchy slogans and soundbites. While it won't earn them any bonus points with the crowd at Advertising Age, the state efforts encourage students to report on tobacco marketing in their area, to write tobacco execs with complaints, and to get involved in grassroots actions . . . not bad for a public service campaign.
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