NYC Dept. of Health, Anti-Smoking
Visiting hell on Earth.
To smokers, “it’s going to kill you” sounds like Charlie Brown’s teacher. Wohht wohht wahhh. “That won’t be me…I have plenty of time to quit… besides, I could get hit by a bus and die tomorrow” are common excuses for lighting up. Sadly, the threat of dying isn’t motivating when that next nicotine hit is calling the shots.
Our solution: Don’t talk about dying. Show the living hell that life can be if you get an illness caused by smoking.
Our team created this idea, and I supervised the shoot that got thousands of New Yorkers throwing things at their television, and hundreds of smokers to finally decide to quit. Deliberately framed to create the claustrophobia of sharing your life with advanced emphyzema, it painted an accurate picture of how it feels to suffer in misery with a smoking-related illness.
I conceived this scenario to show smokers their choices could also bring misery to their innocent loved ones. Here, a son is forced to change his mother’s diaper after a stroke — and she’s left to endure this daily indignity, knowing it’s too late to do anything about it.
Research showed that shock and eww was a powerful weapon in the war on smoking, so we gave smokers their money’s worth.
