Anti Smoking Campaign

Anti-smoking campaigns are prevalent in the United States, but there are also other countries that encourage their smokers to become non-smokers. It is true that smoking is harmful to the body and that it can in fact become an addiction very quickly. Most people are unaware of the harmful effects that smoking causes. There are also some who rarely ever take the Anti-Smoking campaign ads very seriously at all. Most people think that they are invincible and that it would take much more than a few advertisements on the television screen to help them to stop smoking. Other times, many of these campaigns backfire because they may be too explicit and some may just ignore it and change the channel because they can’t bear watching how extreme the ad is. If the message isn’t that explicit but it uses humor or has a celebrity in it then the message could also backfire because the audience can become to distracted and completely forget what the purpose of the ad was in the first place.

This particular Australian, Anti-Smoking campaign ad shows a man lighting his cigarette, and immediately the commercial cues to a doctor in an operating room holding an artery. The artery is supposed to be from a 32-year-old lung and when he squeezes it out there is a white, fatty substance that has clogged the artery. The doctor was teaching the audience that smoking constantly causes this fatty substance to build up in your artery, which eventually causes damages to your lungs, including lung cancer.

Personally, I was a bit disturbed watching the video because I wasn’t exactly sure where they were going with it. In the very beginning the man bends over the gas stove to light his cigarette and I immediately thought that he would catch on fire or something to that effect because of the emphasis they put on him lighting the cigarette. Yet, when they switched to the doctor being in the operating room holding what was supposed to be an artery, and he proceeded to