Competitive Intelligence

Witty Anti-Smoking Ads Strike at the Heart of Teen Status

Boring, preachy anti-smoking ads have always seemed to fall on deaf ears when teens contemplate lighting up. But, the new ad campaign from Truth and the American Legacy Foundation, called "Fair Enough" (which you've GOT to see, if you haven't yet) matches wits with teens and shows tobacco companies as fundamentally evil, out to make fools of them by suckering them into getting hooked on tobacco using shady marketing tactics.

Memos and planning documents are highlighted alongside the online versions of a fictionalized sit-com in which Big Tobacco execs brainstorm product marketing ideas to get more teens to smoke. A "gumball" form factor of chewing tobacco?! Now that would require a level of either immaturity or idiocy (both mortal sins in teendom) as cornerstone customer demographics in order to introduce for the first time... but, as the slogan of the campaign says, "it might be funnier if it wasn't true".

In my view, it's a surprisingly effective message, as Seth Stevenson points out in his Slate.com review of the ads, it appeals to teens' insecurities to apply pressure in getting them to steer clear of tobacco in all its forms:

What's most interesting about these spots is their underlying strategy. The ads aren't saying: "Hey kids, don't smoke! It gives you cancer, it makes your breath stink, and you'll have to talk through that buzzy voice-box thing because you'll have no larynx." (Such were the constant messages of my day—along with tips on resisting peer pressure.)

Instead, these new ads seem to say: "Hey kids, tobacco companies are evil! And you're a tool if you get duped by their manipulative marketing techniques. Do you want to be a tool, kids?"

This tack feels right to me. For, in the end, what does the teen fear most? Is it bad breath? Is it dying? No. (And dying's further down the list than bad breath.)

In fact, the ultimate adolescent nightmare is to appear in any way unsavvy—like an out-of-it rookie who doesn't know the score. These "Fair Enough" ads isolate and prey on that insecurity, and they do a great job. With a dead-on, rerun sitcom parody (jumpy establishing shot; upbeat horn-section theme song ending on a slightly unresolved note; three-wall, two-camera set; canned laugh track), the ads first establish their own savvy, knowing coolness before inviting us to join them in ridiculing big tobacco's schemes. The spots are darkly comic, just the way teens like it. And rather than serving up yet more boring evidence that smoking is deadly (something that all teens, including the ones who smoke, already know) the ads move on to the far more satisfying step: kicking big tobacco in the groin.

Here the campaign preys on another ingrained teen trait—defying authority. The ads construct this logic: Big tobacco is the man; now tell the man to go suck it. An early set of "Truth" ads made this theme even clearer, as kids attacked tobacco company headquarters with bullhorns and protests and street stunts. These looked like outtakes from a Michael Moore movie.

Will teenagers find it more rebellious not to smoke than they ever did to light up in the first place? We'll see... but to be made a fool of is about the least appealing thing teens could ever suffer... and if peer pressure can take this to the next level - getting other teens to buy into the idea and using it as a way to ridicule those suckers who fall for the marketing schemes - then permanent damage may have been done to the tobacco industry.

The last bastion of smoking's coolness will have been neutralized... and with it, their (domestic, at least) customer pipeline. The real trick will be taking that messaging to Asia, where tobacco use is actually on the rise.

- Arik