Wednesday, June 14th, 2006...1:23 pm
Ad campaigns
People generally have a strong ambivalence to advertising, but now and then there are a few gems.
The National Quit Smoking campaign has always used the tactic of scaring the bejeesus out of people to get them to quick, and it’s really outshone itself again with its latest ads. Gangrenous feet that need to be severed, rotting teeth and gums, scars, cirrhosis, definitely yukky stuff. The slogan is quite snazzy as well. “Quitting is hard, but not quitting is harder”.
The other one I like is a print campaign by the Australian Red Cross Blood Service. It has a series of panels which capture some of the reasons why you can’t give blood; there are the routine factors like age, health, and pregnancy which are represented by fairly routine images. Another reason you can’t donate is if you’ve resided in the UK for a period longer than six months between 1980 and 1996 due to the Mad Cow Disease problem. It made me giggle inside (and I don’t giggle) that the image they chose that most represented the British 1980s was Margaret Thatcher. The thinly-veiled but good-natured scarcasm attached to it is also a crack-up.
They’re both to do with the pretty boring topic of ‘health’ yet they’re incredibly effective. One is deliciously subtle and the other is incredibly in your face. If such great ads can be made by organisations that have nothing to gain but “the social good”, then why do corporations with massive stockpiles of cash with the aim of making even more money manage to pump out such crap?Someone Like You… dvd
3 Comments
June 15th, 2006 at 8:46 pm
those smoking ads are really offputting.. and rather unfair… only about 20% or so of people smoke, don’t they? yet now there’s 80% of people, who are non-smokers, trying in vain to quit something they don’t go to get those gruesome pictures of TV. By all means put them on the packets, but not on TV where everyone has to watch them.
That give blood ad was pretty clever I thought… although it (implicitly) suggests having recently had an unprotected gay sex orgy will not affect your ability to donate blood, yet having first hand experience of Thatcher will.
June 15th, 2006 at 9:37 pm
Well, not only are they meant to encourage people to quit, but they also try to scare people (teens) from picking it up in the first place. Maybe they should avoid playing them during dinner-times or something.
June 17th, 2006 at 11:23 am
oh, good point! that’s a good idea… unless they have the motive of reducing obesity levels too or something
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