It was completely inappropriate and cruel to traumatize that child like that. I know you all hate children, but sneering it off as a “a kid crying,” shows the ignorance which can only be displayed by non-parents. It’s much more than crying. That kid is confused and terrified. It might only be for a few seconds, but in the moment, that poor kid is scared shitless and doesn’t understand what’s going on. Maybe you’re missing that it was real, not acted. They really let that kid think he’d been ditched like that. There’s no excuse to hurt a child like that. That first moment when his face goes from confusion to fear breaks my heart.
As an anti-smoking commercial, its completely ineffective, and will only piss off smokers who are parents. The entire approach of trying to fid ways to say that “smoking is bad, mkay” is a waste of time. Everybody that smokes knowsit’s bad for them. They don’t smoke because they think it’s good for them, they smoke because they’re addicted to nicotine. I know from firts hand experience that the idea of trying to quit is scary because it seems like it would be so difficult and unpleasant, and because the smoker is not convinced he/she could actually be permanently successful. I think it would be much more effective to try an approach which is sympathetic to the addiction and tries to persuade people that quitting isn’t as hard as they think it would be. Wagging fingers and saying “quit” is a waste of time. It’s the quitting process itself that needs to be made more inviting and accessible for them.
I’ve been hearing about this for days now, and this is the first time I’ve seen the ad. I’m seriously underwhelmed. A child actor (yes, actor–not a random kid) cried on screen. Big deal. I put my grandson to bed the other night and left the room and (OH, NOES!) he cried for a couple of minutes. String me up.
:rolleyes:Oh, yes, because all newspapers had that headline, and no blogs, message boards, radio news programs, television news programs, YouTube videos, or other sources of information would ever do such a thing.
ETA: Dio, you’re missing the hyperbole of these news stories. We have here a child being trained as an actor who works with his mother. This experience won’t traumatize him for life. Hell, if he’s like my kids, he was over it in minutes or hours and wouldn’t remember it a week later unless someone reminded him.
Um… how do you know it was real? I see comments in the newspaper article linked to in the OP insinuating that it was, but they don’t actually come out and say it.
Well, I said “it” talking about children in general. Don’t worry, I’m not going to go pull a Dave Pelzer.
I just don’t think it’s that hugely traumatic a thing. Kids are separated from their parents every day–for school or because they have to be left with a babysitter/other family member. And sometimes they cry and carry on because they don’t know where their mom is or where she’s going or why, but they stop. They just happened to get it on tape this time.
Also, even if it’s an Australian ad, apparently it’s being played in the U.S. I saw it on TV last night.
He’s 4 years old. He doesn’t even really know what “acting” is. I think it needs to be said again, the kid was not acting. He really thought he’d been abandoned in the middle of a crowd.
Your comparison to putting your grandson to bed is not apt. He didn’t think he’d just been abandoned on the street. The crying is not the issue. It’s jolting the child emotionally like that that’s the issue. You say he’ll “get over it.” Maybe he will, but that doesn’t justify anything.
It’s a pun (fuming = smoking). My guess is that the headline writer went for the neat pun without worrying about the genuine semantic distinctions between merely upset and really fuming.
Kids left in day care are prepared for what’s going to happen, are left in the care of other adults and know that their parents are coming back. They aren’t just abrubtly ditched in the middle of a crowded train station.
That’s exactly what I thought. A more effective ad would be to show a 50 year old woman holding her grandchild and then vanishing- a lot more realistic. Or show people hacking up their lungs into handkerchiefs, or smoking through stomas, or show radiation burns on the backs of people in lung cancer related therapy, or a montage perhaps of the MANY famous people who have died from smoking, etc… Most 30 year old women aren’t going to die from smoking unless they already had some health problems. And even then people are going to stop when they feel like it. The $10 per pack prices are probably getting more people to quit in NYC than all the commercials that ever aired combined.
A big “meh” from me. I don’t think it’s a particularly good ad. I’m not overly concerned about the boy being left alone for 30 seconds to get him crying, I’m sure they made it up to him afterward. I don’t hate children, I have two of my own. This isn’t something I’d do to my 3 year old, but I wouldn’t do any kind of acting anyway.
Man, what? Is that all? Some random kid crying for a minute? Who cares? I was expecting something creepy like those Canadian PSAs about people getting electrocuted.
This is also, like, the least creepy anti-smoking PSA New York is subjected to. Most of them tell and show you in graphic detail how smoking will lead to you getting various parts of your body amputated.
What that commercial needed was, as soon as the kid started crying, a hip teenager with a megaphone should have come out and started yelling smoking factoids at the child.
Heh, when the kid was touching his shirt at one point, I thought for sure that he was going to pull out a cig and start smoking. And that the message was going to be “Is this how you want your kid to cope with life?” or similar.
The only thing offensive about the ad is that this was a real kid they scared on purpose, which is not okay. The message itself is fine. I’m still very surprised they would do this to a young child just to prove something. I agree with Dio. Sure he’ll get over it, but that’s not really the point.
