I just saw this new commercial from truth campaign, which always has those “off beat” and “shocking” ads on television about the tactics of big tobacco companies.
Could I possibly be the only one who’s not okay with this? I’m well aware of the point that they’re trying to get across, I’m familiar with their other commercials using similar approaches (which are also sometimes in poor taste, in my opinion), and yes, the comment they’re mocking is absolutely atrocious. But . . . somehow I don’t feel like “it’s ironic!” quite covers a commercial depicting dancing punching bags illustrated with smiling cartoon women singing about wife-beating.
The website provides a statistic about intimate partner violence and information on how to find help if you’re in an abusive relationship — but this commercial seems to be ignoring the feelings of women who are or have been in those relationships, and the content of the commercial is regarding an entirely different agenda. None of this anti-violence information is provided at the end of the television commercial, only information about their anti-tobacco website. In short, I got a very bad taste in my mouth when I saw this, and it’s not fading.
You?
When I first watched this commercial, I found myself grimacing. I turned to my partner and asked, “Did you understand that? What the hell is up with that song and dance routine?”
what is stupidest is that this has nothing to do with why you should quit smoking…just sings about some dumb comment some dumbass made which actually has nothing to do with smoking.
shock does not equal effective
my guess is that their PSAs actually have the opposite effect of what they want. to say this was in poor taste is a drastic understatement
I don’t know if the ad works as a PSA, but the I don’t find the premise offensive.
What the executive said was reprehensible and deserving of mockery. The exec was saying that wife beating is just another bad habit, like smoking. Maybe he was scaremongering–smoking could be holding your darkest impulses in check, so you’d better not quit.
The ad doesn’t endorse that attitude, it dramatizes how ridiculous and evil it is. This is the attitude that the tobacco companies have towards their customers. The implication is that the execs don’t care about people, or the truth–which is actually true.
When evaluating the ad, it’s important to consider the objectives of the truth campaign. Their goal is not to discourage people from smoking, but rather to distrust the tobacco companies and their self-serving happytalk.
It’s in the tradition of Ad Busters.
The ad doesn’t endorse that attitude, it dramatizes how ridiculous and evil it is.
Again, as I said in the post, I understand that this is what they were going for. I don’t think that they were endorsing domestic violence. I do, however, think that they were carelessly and thoughtlessly making light of it. They’re not the same thing.
I’m not offended. I’ve been in physically abusive relationships. But I’m not easily offended, nor do I get easily bunched up when I get the joke. They’re mocking the desperation of the executive and his willingness to hide behind the horror of domestic violence to scare people off questioning his product.
Aren’t those Truth ads funded by tobacco companies who want to be in compliance with the terms of lost lawsuits? Some of them make smoking seem cool in comparison to the whingeing of the actors.
Any truth.com ad makes me want to smoke, and I quit a year ago. I think their ads shoot for “tobacco companies are bad!” as opposed to actually convincing people to not smoke. Across the board, they’re ineffective ads. And here they are, as you said, offensive.
And now I really want a smoke.
You’re not the only person who is wondering this. I’ve spent many years working in pulmonary medicine (research) and most of my colleagues and I have been thinking that big tobacco are behind these ads too
“Tobacco companies are bad” is a worthwhile message in and of itself. Big Tobacco has been a force for evil in America quite apart from the health effects of smoking. They’re integral to the tort reform movement and the Republican money machine. They pioneered the denialism and pseudoscience tactics that are choking off public discourse about science–before there was Exxon funded global warming denial there was tobacco funded misinformation about the health effects of smoking. Big Tobacco pioneered the lobbying industrial complex we know today.
I’m not that bothered by it because it’s not like the idea to compare domestic violence with smoking started with them. Yeah, they ran with it, but it started with something truely appalling that a cigarette exec said.
I do think it would have been a better ad if it had gone on just a few seconds longer. The song and dance point out that the idea is stupid, but it’s really too light-hearted to get across how heartless and evil it is. The dancer’s disgusted read on “beat your wife?!?” right there at the end tries to convey that, but the bit cuts out before it has a chance to sink in.
Ummm.. I actually have worked with the Truth campaign. So, I know a lot about them. Their funding comes from the Big Tobacco Settlement in the 90s, Big Tobacco themselves have nothing to do with what the truth commercials are actually doing though. They have no say over the Truth campaign.
No… as to how effective their ads are… I believe their older stuff was FAR more effective then these newer ads.
Their point is that the majority of Americans *know* smoking is bad for you, so that’s not their focus. Their focus is exposing the bullshit that is happening behind closed doors in Big Tobacco.
I’m not addressing the ad in question either way, but I thought I could give some background on Truth.com itself.
Ugh. “No” in the second paragraph should be “Now.”
I don’t really get this ad, but I do agree with Lindsay that anything that makes tobacco companies look bad makes me happy. My dad died from lung cancer and I cannot begin to convey how awful it was, or how much I hate tobacco companies.
It just seems like they could have done something more constructive with that awful quote. The ad doesn’t make much sense, and leaves itself open to potentially messed up interpretations.
@ Ashley – I’m very sorry that your dad died from lung cancer. My dad died from lung cancer too. When I was 14. And I will also agree that there is no way to convey the hatred I have for tobacco companies or the people who run them because unless you’ve been around someone who is dying from lung cancer, you cannot even fathom what a horrible death it is.
That being said, I don’t think these ads are effective at all. Mostly, they’re just annoying. I understand what they’re trying to do, and I appreciate it, but I wish they’d find a less annoying (and often less offensive) way of showing people how incredibly evil cigarette companies are because most people I know, myself included, turn the channel when these commercials come on.
The most shocking (and I think effective) anti-smoking commercial I ever saw was a commercial that simply featured a woman with a tracheotomy, talking to the camera, breathing through her neck every time she wanted to talk, and then finally, putting her cigarette in the hole in her neck and drawing in the smoke. That image still haunts me, and if I hadn’t lost my father to lung cancer I think that commercial probably would have scared me enough not to ever try in the first place.
At this point my contribution isn’t too different from consensus: important and worthwhile to highlight horrible things tobacco execs say, the concept and execution of the ad treats the subject matter recklessly. It’s not that domestic violence can never be a vehicle for satire and that it can never be treated ironically, but there’s a HUGE responsibility to do it right, and Truth was juggling plutonium in this ad.
Ashley and nicole, i add ny condolences. my grandfather also died of lung cancer. never smoked a day in his life. allergic to it.
he got cancer from his diesel truck. the exhaust.
this is why these ads piss me off. while there is a lot of circumstantial evidence that smoking MAY cause cancer (in those who are already genetically predispositioned), it’s jus that: circumstanstial. take people AWAY from all the pollution we all lie in (did you know riding in a car for an hour puts more carbon dioxcide in your body than 2 or 3 packs o NON FILTERED cigarettes (the difference is what kinda car… )
the whole case has been a lie since day ine. i’m not saying smiking isn’t bad for you in some ways, i am say everything they lay at the foot of tobacco has been magnified to incredible proportions. and now, no one is looking for the real truth anymore, just blaming cigarettes.
but the cigarette companies? Oligargies are as evil as Monopolies…
Ugh, how poorly executed. Almost all of the energy and focus (and volume) goes into the song and dance routine, so the message I take away from the ad is “smoke, and beat your wife”. The spacing is backwards.
The ad should have stated the quote, paused to let it sink in, then 10 seconds of low energy filler, maybe a domestic scene of a hard looking guy smoking through a trachea hole while watching his wife clean house, and an extended “wait, …what did he say?” pause at the end. I’m not offended, but I’m irritated that they botched up the execution so badly.
For the message it was giving, I actually think it was exceedingly well done. We would all ignore another 10 “dramatic” second look at an ugly person smoking — and anyway I really don’t think that’s more sensitive at all. This mocks exactly the message that the dumbass executive made in the tones he made it in, instead of mocking a strawman and doing yet another shaming routine.
I can agree that it doesn’t really send any message about why not to smoke, and so perhaps the topic wasn’t great. “Don’t smoke because this one tobacco guy is stupid” doesn’t work all that well on some people. I just like it because it made me laugh.
I liked their previous campaigns, but the singing and dancing with the cartoon animals is really irritating. I thought the first one was an interesting idea, but they’ve taken it way too far.
Don’t you get it, Cara? The feelings of women or basic human decency just don’t matter here. There is nothing, nothing, more important than vitriol directed at the big bad tobacco companies. I mean, they’re EVIL…
All sarcasm aside these ads got under my skin before and this just adds to the pile. Yeah, the tobacco companies are underhanded, manipulative, and probably even criminal, but come on. Believing the tobacco companies when they talked down the health risks of cigarettes is like believing your friend who tells you its totally cool to stay out and go drinking on a Sunday night and that you’ll be fine come Monday morning. You both know its bullshit but you’ve colluded because you want it to be true. Any reasonably intelligent person who has ever smoked a cigarette, much less been a regular smoker, knows its bad for their health. The medical community has known it causes cancer for longer than a good chunk of smokers have been alive. Hell, my grandparents were told to quit smoking by their doctor in the early 50s.
The bottom line is that these truth ads are trying to make a point that didn’t need to be made in the first place and had been done to death by the time the first one aired. Now they’re making light of domestic violence to tell us something we’ve known for generations. It isn’t only morally offensive but insulting to our intelligence.
Denelian, just because arsenic is bad for you doesn’t mean that cyanide isn’t *also* bad for you.
It is proven, without a doubt, 100% accurate, that smoking causes cancer. Not all people who smoke will get cancer, because you’re right, there are genetic predispositions. (And some will get emphysema instead, which is what killed my grandfather-in-law). And not all people who get cancer smoke, which has been a terrible side effect of the anti-smoking campaign — people actually feel less sympathy for those who get lung cancer because they assume they got it from smoking.
It is true that we need better emissions standards (our cars are actually pretty damn good, but trucks need to be held to *much* tighter emissions standards than they are now, and for a long time SUVs got away with murder because they were classified as trucks.) It is true that in general, we should stop polluting (and we’ve been working on it; the air is much cleaner now than it was when I was a child.) But to imply that because pollution exists and can kill people, the risk of smoking is overblown, is irresponsible. Sucking pollutants directly into your lungs two or three times a day is *obviously* going to be worse than just sitting in a car unless the car is in an enclosed garage (carbon dioxide, BTW, is not a pollutant — or to be more precise, it’s a greenhouse gas, so it is a pollutant, but it is also something naturally produced by all living things, it’s not a *poison*, and it can’t kill you unless it replaces all the oxygen in the air and suffocates you. You might be thinking of carbon *monoxide*, but even though that’s a killer, it doesn’t cause cancer; it kills essentially by suffocation, replacing the oxygen in the bloodstream with CO. Cigarettes have about a zillion different poisons in them besides either CO or CO2.)
I am sorry for your grandfather. Diesel truck emissions used to be absolutely awful, and they still have a ways to go before anyone would consider them clean. I don’t think we should let up on corporate responsibility to make non-polluting products across the board just because we are willing to get up in Big Tobacco’s face. But the fact that pollution is bad for the environment and can kill people does not change the fact that smoking is bad for the individual and can kill people as well.
The tRUTH campaign- totally owned by RJ Reynolds. My friend works for them as well, which how I know. Honestly, that’s probably why the commercials are so obnoxious.
Also- anyone notice that this is the only one of their commercials that features women as the spokespeople?
i think one of the points i was trying to make last night (after i took my meds, bad Den) is that while we know that things in cigarettes kill… we don’t DO NOT know that they do it alone. we don’t know that if someone lived in a pristine area and smoked that anything would happen. yes, there are “bad things” is smokes, but compared to everything else? we CAN’T test for that. we don’t have people who have been raised with no pollutants. it’s not that i think smoking isn’t bad for you. it’s that i think its not as bad as many other things we (collectivly do), including eating sugar. and while i do NOT think that Big Tobacco Is My Friend, i also don’t think that the current plans and ideology surrounding smoking is good or useful.
does that make sense? i can try again, i know i am having issues saying what i am trying to say because of my meds
I’ve found all of the ‘sing-song’ truth ads to be in rather poor taste. The massive size of the betrayal they’re highlighting doesn’t lend itself well to irony, even with complicated dance numbers.
I think the punching bag women did get more of a “wtf” response from me than usual though. And that being directed at the commercial, not the commercial’s message, is just bad advertising.
we don’t know that if someone lived in a pristine area and smoked that anything would happen.
Er, you think we don’t have data from people living in “pristine areas” and smoking? Unless your standard for “pristine areas” excludes anywhere humans actually live, in which case your point is rather meaningless. But people live all over the world, smoke cigarettes all over the world, and die from lung cancer in statistically significant relationships with their smoking habits, all over the world.
The visuals in this ad are what really offended me. The song is bad, inane, grating and does not get its point across. But the punching bag women, all identical and round with their little house wife hair cuts, they disgust me. I felt like it was speaking to a very old fashioned hetero normative relationship model, in which a woman has no agency, her husband might smoke or might hit her, and she’s going to bob back and forth with a smile on her face like those creepy punching bags. I also don’t understand why the two women singing had to present themselves as something out of High School the Musical. There is nothing that appeals to an adult in this commercial, and no part of the message seems applicable to a child. It is just a bad advertisement and I can’t believe that it was made by professionals, then assumedly run through some sort of screening processed and was then aired (constantly) with out anyone realizing that it was both offensive and ineffective.