scAD Wars: Anti Smoking
scAD Wars is brought to you by Advertising Design professor Sean Trapani’s Copywriting for Broadcast class.
JENN GLOVER
Callie, you’re daft, smoking, child-hating woman. How can you, or any other smoker, put even one more cigarette to your lips after seeing such an ad?
You dare to take an opposing stance? I truly feel sorry for you. There are times in advertising when we can do more than just convince people to spend $300 on a torn pair of jeans.
There are times in advertising when we are given an opportunity to change lives, and when that opportunity arises, it is both our responsibility and privilege as advertising professionals to push it to the limit and to drive the message home.
That’s exactly what this ad does: it pushes the limits of our emotional barriers and drills the message deep into our hearts and minds. I don’t even smoke and I wanted to quit smoking after that ad.
It’s effective, and that was the ad’s original goal. Go ahead and get mad in all your poison-sucking glory.
You can talk about how unethical it is to make a child cry or how overdone it is. But what you cannot deny is the bitter pang of guilt and pain it causes when you see that child helplessly searching for his missing mother.
How far should advertising go to save the lives of tens of thousands of people? If you were given the choice between letting 20,000 people die or making a child cry for a single minute, which would you choose?
I can answer that for you, since the cigarette smoke is probably blocking your airways and popping your brain cells as we speak. The answer is advertising should go as far as it needs to go.
No ad is too horrible and no ad is too hard to watch when it comes to saving lives.
CALLIE VINSON
Jenn, you’re such an oversensitive, unrealistic dreamer. I think, as I have a cigarette to my lips, that you’re being a tad dramatic about this ad.
You’re right there are opportunities to change lives in advertising. However, is this really changing a smoker’s life? Nah. A kid crying because he lost his mother doesn’t make me want to ash out my cigarette.
In fact, this ad makes me want to light up another because I feel that sorry for the kid on screen. If you think this ad is really pushing to the limit, you’re sadly mistaken.
Pushing to the limit would be an actual tear trickling down my face and hundreds to follow. I don’t think it’s unethical to make a child cry, that’s life. I do think that the ad needs to get to the point a little quicker though.
I have things to do here, people to see. When I first started watching this ad honestly I thought I clicked on the wrong YouTube video.
A parent and child walking around in a building? Its time to change the channel because of the sappy music playing in the background and predictable visual that I just don’t care about.
Twenty thousand people dying is their choice. I know I’m not going to live as long as I could because I am a smoker. I came to terms with that a while ago. However, making a child cry to try and save the stubborn 20,000 people out there from fully enjoying their cigarettes beginning to end is not right.
Advertising does need to go as far as it needs to, but they should be picking on someone their own size in their commercials in order to really reach me.
