Yes, my dear anti-smoking community, I get it: Smoking is bad for your health. Yes, this kind of stuff can happen to someone who smokes. It’s a sucky condition to have to live with, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
But guess what? I DON’T SMOKE! And I have no inclination to start. Smoking doesn’t appeal to me, and it never has. Yet I have made the conscious decision not to judge people that like to smoke. Provided they do it in an environment in which I don’t have to breath the shit, puff away!
But these ads showing people with holes in their throats, living with the consequences of a habit they knew wasn’t good for them, only fills me with contempt for YOU!
When I was a kid, watching all that anti-smoking stuff on the TV, and in the school hallways, and pretty much anywhere you guys thought kids’ eyes would turn, I LISTENED! I did what you told me to do! When my friends got into smoking, I DIDN’T! I admire the work you guys do, but getting me all creeped out and distrubed by this stuff gains you NOTHING. And every smoker I know who has seen these ads hasn’t changed their views on smoking in the least.
So given this, is it too much to ask that you NOT subject me to these distrubing ads while I’m watching ESPN?! Thank God I have Tivo, and can just pause for 40 seconds until your ad is over.
sigh Ahhhhh…Ok, I feel a lot better now. Had to get that out. Anyone else find this shit as disturbing as I do, and wish it wasn’t shoved down our(hopefully hole-free) throats? Seriously, I appreciate the message they’re trying to send, but this just crossed a line with me.
Maybe you and the smokers you know aren’t their chief target audience. Lifelong nonsmokers and confirmed habitual smokers are probably not very vulnerable to anti-smoking scare ads.
Perhaps they’re trying to reach exactly the same sort of people that they seem to have successfully reached in your case, back in the day when you were a kid seeing anti-smoking ads. If today’s hole-in-the-throat ads gross out teenagers enough to prevent some of them from becoming addicted to smoking, you will not have been creeped out in vain.
My great-uncle+ (mom’s favorite uncle) had a hole in his throat because of smoking. He had to talk using one of those voder things because of it.
As a little kid, I couldn’t understand him and thought the hole in his throat was creepy. Consequently, I have never had any interst in trying smokes, and certainly never thought it “cool”.
I wonder if scare tactics has ever worked with respect to behavior modification. I’m not sure it has. All these commercials do is make me grab the remote and change the channel.
While we’re at it, I want all those Coors ads on television, on billboards and in the magazines to go away! I don’t drink Coors, and i will never drink Coors, so why are they wasting millions of dollars on this advertising? Also, about all those ads for feminine hygiene products…
Yeah, but I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess that you’re an adult whose behavior is already pretty firmly entrenched as either a long-term nonsmoker or a long-term habitual smoker.
In either case, you’re not the sort of person anti-smoking scare ads would primarily be aimed at. If you’re already a nonsmoker then you’ve got no behavior modifications to make, and if you’re a confirmed smoker then you probably already know the major health risks of smoking but have decided to continue the habit anyway.
If you were an inexperienced younger person with little information about smoking risks and no very definite opinions about smoking, though, you might have a strong OMG THAT’S DISGUSTING reaction that would nudge you in the direction of avoiding smoking.
I know this: Were I a smoker, my instinct to ‘dig in’ would probably activate were I to watch these ads. I would probably go “Bah, this only happens to people who smoke too much, or to often, or too long at one time. These are the STUPID smokers.” So even if I were a smoker, these ads wouldn’t do much good for me.
And frankly, all it took to make me not want to smoke was the occasional PSA with celbrities saying stuff like “You’ve got nothing to prove.” and “Resist peer pressure.” Also, the teacher had to say something like “Smokin’s bad, 'mmkay.”
By the time you reach your twenties, chances are you’re pretty hard-set on your smoking status, whatever it may be. It can change over time, what with free will and all. But everyone in my peer group(late teens, early twenties) finds these ads disturbing, yet smoker or non-smoker, it hasn’t changed their opinion.
If the anti-smoking people want to show this kind of stuff, show it to the people they are actually trying to reach: school kids. But of course, if you showed this kind of stuff to kids, you’d have to take the heat from parents who would go “Oh, that was too graphic to show my little Timmy!:mad:”.
In my heart of hearts, I know that if this message actually influences somebody to not smoke, and not subject themselves to the health hazards that accompany that, it’s probably a good thing. But that doesn’t make me any less mad that I have to be subjected to this kind of graphic material. And I can’t see the kinds of people that watch the channels I do being affected by these ads in the way the ad-makers want. So I would rather they stay off my television.
I’ve been a smoker for 20 odd years now. Started when I was 13. I’ve tried to quit more times than I can count. It sucks because each time you try, it makes trying again that much harder because you know it’ll likely end in failure, yet again.
Sure the commercials are revolting and disturbing. However, if it does manage to stop one person for smoking I’m all for it. The whole point of the commercial is to be as revolting as possible.
Totally agree! I don’t smoke either. I also don’t have hemorrhoids, don’t get a monthly visit from “Mother Nature”, and toilet paper doesn’t stick to my ass. Can we stop those ads too?
I am extremely happy with these ads, though they make me sick to my stomach. My 15 yr old who is in the “ZOMG Mommy, stop talking I know already!” stage, is also viscerally repelled by, yet compelled to watch these commercials. The first few times she was literally slack-jawed with surprise that smoking could make you lose body parts not connected with your lungs. The one with the guy who says not to bend over after eating or else your food will come back out, had a big impact too.
For her at least, these are having a bigger impact than the series of ads focusing on the cosmetic aspects of smoking - bad breath, ugly teeth, stinking clothes, etc. I think this is because you can do something fairly easy to fix the cosmetic things but there is nothing you can do to “fix” a stoma or amputation.
Most evenings we watch MSNBC, A&E, and whichever channel Pawn Stars comes on, so I’m glad these aren’t relegated to just the “kid” channels. Although I would like it if they didn’t show during dinner.
The difference, of course, is that the Coors ads and the feminine hygiene product ads are trying to entice us, so they generally include fairly pleasant images and sounds. Now if the hygiene product ads were showing used tampons or pads to demonstrate how absorbant they are, so that they squick me out, I could see a parallel request for eliminating them. Of couse maybe the simple mention of the product grosses you out, in which case…yeah, let’s get rid of them too.
They do show used pads in the ads, they just use blue liquid instead of red which isn’t particularly enticing to me. Neither are the ads with the orange bears with TP stuck to their butts.
I’m 50/50 about the cigarette ads - I’ve seen them often enough that I’m tired of them and some of them are really disgusting. If the target audience is young children to try to prevent them from starting smoking, why are they shown late at night - there was just one on here at just after midnight. And I’m tired of being preached at. Seems they should just make cigarettes illegal and be done with it.
