That’s my favorite one. By that same logic: the main ingredient in dog pee is water and I also am made up partially of water, so therefore I am dog pee.
Interesting logic.
Supposedly, the tobacco companies have no control over any of the ads. My argument is simply that nobody knows if the thetruth.com ads are effective. (Which segued from an argument that thetruth.com ads are too stupid to be effective.)
Sure, that’s the theory. But there’s one group that you’re supposed to be working for. And there’s another group that’s actually signing your paycheck. Which group’s agenda are you really going to listen to?
It’s the ugly reality of advertising; it works. People do things because advertising told them to do it. I do it. You do it. Millions of people do it.
I find the “Truth” ads annoying. The fact that they label themselves “Truth” while their ads mostly deal in partial or incomplete truths.
Is it possible to refrain from doing something impossible?
I know you were joking. I’m not trying to be snarky, I had fun doing the math and imagining it in practical terms. 
There are 86,400 seconds in a day assuming you don’t sleep.
10,000 cigarettes a day gives 8.64 seconds per smoke, almost 7 smokes per minute.
Thats almost 417 smokes an hour. I’m a smoker and I don’t think I could smoke one cigarette a minute. If I did, I would be pretty dizzy.
If you smoked 1.43 packs a day, which I would consider a heavy habit, it would take you 50 weeks, almost a year, to smoke your 10,000 cigarettes.
That’s when I saw my mistake. The post said 100,000 smokes! That changes things a bit.
100,000 cigarettes a day allows 1.16 smokes a second, almost 70 smokes a minute, or 4,167 smokes an hour. 100,000 smokes is 5,000 packs or 500 cartons. You would need a nice size van to deliver them. At the rate of a carton a week (1.43 packs a day) it would only take a heavy smoker over 9 years and 7 months to smoke them all.
And the remains! Forget smoking them, imagine for the next 24 hours you had to deal with something that produced a cigarette butt (and the equivalent ash) every second.
Apos, if you ever give in and smoke instead of refraining, I’d disconnect any smoke alarms you might have and notify your neighbors and the local fire department to just ignore the smoke pouring out of your windows. 
Probably not the group that’s suing you for vilifying them
Certainly not those who threaten that they’re going to withdraw funding if you keep up the current ad style:
You might, however, listen to an impressive list of former Secretaries of Health and Surgeons General and the CDC who support the ads:
Or, I guess, you could always listen to Frank’s friend’s teenagers.
Daniel
Left a list of political appointees who support more spending on their projects is hardly unbiased support.
What, pray tell, would convince you? The folks I listed are not in power: they’re past appointees. They’re not people who are famous for being power-hungry. They were not in positions that are traditional homes for plum jobs: they’re positions that traditionally are held by, y’know, competent people.
But apparently their support for this project is meaningless. An article written by scientists (admittedly who received funding that could have influenced results) and reviewed and approved by other scientists (who did not receive any such funding) is meaningless.
I’ll see if I can dig up a quote from God Almighty, Lord of Heaven and Earth, saying that these ads are effective. After that, I’ll see if Carl Sagan said anything so I can convince the atheists out there.
Y’all are taking this skepticism schtick too far. I’ve offered two pieces of substantial evidence–not overwhelming evidence, but substantial evidence–that this ad campaign, however odious and stupid you think it is (for the record, I’ve not seen the ads in years, and have no opinion on their aesthetic quality), has a postive effect on curbing teen smoking. Y’all have offered to offer the opinions of a couple of teenagers, as if the plural of anecdote is data.
Daniel
Left people have been arguing for FUCKING ever on how one can tell how you can know what the results of an advertising campaign are. It strikes me as ridiculously naive to believe that this study on the effectiveness of anti smoking ad campaign has figured it out where every body else has failed.
And if I’d said the study was the final word, you’d have a point. I’m not saying that: I’m saying it’s substantial evidence in that direction. As near as I know, its basic methodology–finding correlations between knowledge of the campaign and the campaign’s desired behavior, while controlling for other factors–is the standard method used to judge an advertising campaign’s efficacy. Do you have research that demonstrates this is not a good method? Do you have anything beyond unsupported skepticism?
Daniel
Left I don’t see how you can say there is substantial evidence at all. As has been pointed out the campaign is multi pronged. The ads are just one small part. There has also been new vigor to enforcement of anti smoking laws, raises in cigarette taxes etc. It is ridiculous to say you have anything approaching substantial evidence.
Left Hand of Dorkness, I’m going to drop out of this conversation while we’re still speaking to each other.
For those who may be interested, the co-worker who remembered to ask reports that her two teenage sons think the ads are cool.
I just turned 20 last month and these ads were all over the place throughought my teen years (going back to middle school, if I remember). I am their target audience. I think they are stupid. The ads come across as though they believe that teenagers are dumb and wont see through the clear propaganda and lies. We do.
We had many discussions in high school about these ads, every single one of my peers thought they were stupid and condescending.
I don’t smoke because I think it is a disgusting, unhealthy habit. I would consider smoking to stick it to the Truth people, though.
Again, the plural of anecdote is not data. (your situation could be easily explained by a couple strong personalities in your peer group who considered the ads to be dumb, and the extremely strong desire–a desire these ads play on–for teenagers not to appear gullible or easily manipulated). How do you account for the specific findings of the study I cited, and for the support for these ads from so many folks who used to work in the field?
Frank, I appreciate the report about your findings with your friend’s teenagers.
Daniel
(bolding mine)
So, anecdotes are good so long as they agree with your position. I see.
I suspect LHoD doesn’t give it any weight, but that he appreciates my honesty even though it undercut my position, just as I appreciated his honesty earlier. Could be wrong.
First off, there’s no bolding there. Second off, I didn’t say that any anecdotes were good: when you have to lie about my position, you become not worth talking wtih. All I did was to thank Frank: while I do not think his anecdote has persuasive value for or against the efficacy of the ads, I appreciated the fact that he did think the anecdote would be persuasive, and that he reported the results of it despite the fact that any persuasive value it would have would be against the position he was (more or less) taking. In other words, I was thanking him for his integrity, not for his support for my position.
Daniel
Not wrong at all!
Daniel
Okay, preemptive apology for the triple post, but my first post in the series also requires an apology. Diosa, I shouldn’t have said you were lying about my position. You misrepresented me, and I believe you did so by interpreting my words in the least charitable way possible, but that’s not the same thing as a lie. I’m sorry for saying otherwise: I posted in anger.
Daniel
Actually, the money going to the states from the tobacco companies is a considerable sum, over the spending of which the companies have no authority to control. And only a small amount of that goes to anti- advertising. The funds are controlled by the National Association of Attorney Generals (yes, NAAG), and basically operate as an additional tax on the companies if they want to continue operations in any given state. No external controls exist on how the states use that money, and in fact they use it for anything they want…it’s treated as a general slush fund or not, depending on the state you’re in.
This is revenue raising, not Robin Hood, believe it. In some states, they even use it for agricultural research, and since in those states tobacco is a main agricultural export…well, you do the math.
The 2005 GAO Report on the settlement allocation is enlightening. For example, in 2004 Georgia reported spending about 12.5 million on “Tobacco Control” which included education, whereas over 65 million was spent on “Economic development for tobacco regions.” Hawaii tossed about 4.5 mil into education, and around 8.8 million into its “Rainy Day” fund. Virginia? 51 million to “General Purposes,” 12.8 to education.
The tobacco companies may not care for the advertising, but they like being pinched by The Man even less, especially when The Man is claiming the moral highground when in Truth (har har) he’s just pimping out his citizens for a bigger cut. These ads represent only the tip of an over 15 billion dollar iceberg that’s been lodged somewhere far up the ass of the tobacco industry, and are not likely to be the biggest problem they’ve got with the situation. This is beyond spin control; the industry is being publicly horse-fucked, so it’s not as if they’ve got the luxury to worry about whether or not kids think the ads are sufficiently uncool.
(PDF warning) http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d05312.pdf
They’re unlikely to care much and the relationship between NAAG and the companies isn’t even remotely friendly. Just sayin’ is all.
I didn’t mention it before in all the fury, but if you check out the links I’ve offered above, it appears that ALG is no longer receiving money from the tobacco companies; the organization formed by all the ex-Surgeons General etc. was formed to find new funding for the ads, if I understand correctly.
Daniel