You do know that this “graphic material” is a living, breathing (through her throat) human being, right? These are people, this is how they get ready in the morning…sorry you’re offended by someone else’s medical condition, but you don’t really have any sort of right not to be subjected to reality. All the naughty bits are covered, there’s no blood or blunt force trauma or infected sores or cancerous lungs on screen, just people. The same people who you may be “subjected to” on the street. The same people that sixth graders now may become in the future if they chose to smoke.
You can’t see middle school aged boys watching ESPN? I’d have thought they’d watch a whole lot of ESPN.
Coors ads aren’t disturbing. You want a comparison, show actual dead bodies caused by drinking. But wait, I’ve never seen an ad go there.\
EDIT: And whynot, stop being such an asshole. You have no right to tell people not to be grossed out by things. These ads are shot specifically to make these people you pretend to care about look horrible. And you think that’s a good thing? You’re the one not thinking of them as people.
Didn’t say he had no right to be grossed out. Of course he has a right to be grossed out. What he doesn’t have is a right to push all these people into invisibility *because *he’s grossed out.
It’s right there in the OP that these tactics are effective, or were effective, for the OP. So what, his is the only generation of kids worth scaring into not smoking? Fuck the current generation, because trachs are too icky for ESPN, where ankles get broken and ACLs get torn and hockey players beat the shit out of each other on camera and we get to watch replays of it all afternoon?
Dahl (2003) conducted a study which presented three different forms of advertising containing the same message to a target audience. The control was “information” (neutrally presented more or less) and there were two experimental conditions (inducing fear and causing shock). The shock condition led to greater recognition and attention. There were no statistically significant differences in how much the audience liked or understood the adverts. A second study was also conducted where participants were observed while they were alone with three different adverts (same conditions) and they chose to pay attention to the shocking elements.
There are ethical concerns which are brought up in the study: I’d be cynical if other companies started using these techniques of “norm violation” to force consumers to pay attention (there is some evidence that they already are), but I can provisionally say that they seem effective for health promotion. Arousal may be a confounding factor though, I think I recall a repeat measures study which looked at long term recall of health information (recall and adherence are the two desired outcomes after-all, not just immediate appreciation) when information was presented in high arousal conditions, but I can’t find it.
One of my more powerful memories from residency is seeing an inpatient smoker with a probable laryngeal carcinoma (I did a needle aspiration of his tumor prior to laryngectomy to confirm the malignancy). That was a scared man, facing life with a hole in his throat (how long a life, hard to say). Had I any lingering temptation to start smoking, that would have killed it.
I’m not sure how effective these commercials are, given the level of denial smokers and would-be smokers possess (and I have started muting the ads when they come on TV). I do applaud any effective means of cutting down on smoking, regardless of the income it costs me as a pathologist (I average several new cancer diagnoses per week that are likely tobacco-related).
Aren’t you the one always telling people they should have respect for others? So why are you defending the OP for calling the woman in the commercial “gross”?
Currently watching my mother-in-law die of advanced Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease(COPD) and I can assure you it’s better to have the people around you grossed out by something on TV and never start smoking than to have to nurse those same people through end stage COPD later.
Here’s another angle. The choir is made up of faithful churchgoers, who presumably believe in most of the church’s theological positions. They still have to listen to the sermons week in and week out.
You have made the decision not to smoke, and that’s great. But until media is perfectly tailored to each and every consumer, ads like this are what the choir has to put up with in order to have a chance of saving the sinner in the pews.
I’ve seen pieces of two. I cannot help but wonder how smoking causes one to lose both legs, or be immobile.
I obviously pay scant attention to any TV advertisement.
I do hope if those two I described are really in that situation they were paid a lot of money to make the commercial.
The leg amputations are usually a consequence of cardiovascular disease, to which smoking is a contributing factor because it accelerates atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries).
If cardiovascular disease causes blockage of the vascular blood supply to the legs, the legs can become gangrenous and need to be amputated. (Untreated gangrene is almost always fatal AFAIK, besides being pretty damn horrific-looking.)
This is a tangential rant, and a pet peeve of mine, that I’ve shared before but this is an appropriate place to share it again.
When my wife (a long-time smoker, who had quit a few years prior) was in the hospital with lung cancer, she was watching TV. It was Susan G Komen time, and there was a barrage of ads for empowered women bravely and cheerily joining in solidarity in the fight against breast cancer.
And then there was the barrage of anti-tobacco scare ads (funded largely by cigarette tax money), showing piles of corpses and skeletons and Grim Reapers and hole-in-throats.
My wife said “I wish I had one of those cute pink cancers”.
We as a society have decided that we can best fight breast cancer by raising funds for research; and that we can best fight lung cancer by preventing smoking. This may be statistically accurate, but it also says to people who have lung cancer “sucks to be you”. Lung cancer death rates have not budged in 40 years.
(And I believe the unspoken second half of that societal agreement is “and lung cancer victims have only themselves to blame”. Which is really unfortunate if you’re one of the thousands of non-smokers who gets lung cancer.)
According to this report, that isn’t true. The decline in cancer death rates from 1999 to 2008 applied to each of the four most common types of cancer (including lung cancer), as well as to the average death rate overall.
Moreover, the incidence of new lung cancer cases also declined during the same period. Yes, it’s still true that the best way to fight lung cancer large-scale is to reduce smoking, but that doesn’t mean that nobody’s trying to make things better for people once they actually get lung cancer.
Assuming (a big assumption) that cancer death rate = deaths from cancer / population, then the drop in lung cancer death rate can largely be attributed to a drop in the number of smokers.
A more pertinent statistic would be the chances of survival, and I think that’s the number that hasn’t budged in 40 years – we haven’t come up with an effective lung cancer treatment.
Some of this is because we’ve discovered that 85% of cases of lung cancer (in women, a higher percentage in men) are caused by smoking. If we found a single thing that caused 85% of breast cancer cases, and that thing turned out to be a behavior that people could abstain from and still live a fulfilling life, you’d see more emphasis on preventing it.