The Failure of Anti-Smoking Ad Campaigns

For decades, researchers and scientists have been studying on the impact of anti-smoking advertising campaigns .As a result of some research , main question arises : “do anti-smoking ads really have an impact on people’s decision about quitting smoking?” or “do they really work?” It is a controversial issue and plenty of studies and investigations support that there is no clear evidence to prove they have a significant influence on adults’ or youth’ decisions. The most striking reason of why anti-smoking ads fail is that there is not enough attention to encourage smokers or they are not supposed to prevent people from smoking. The reason is advertisements are made to profit .Anti-smoking ads are not advantageous or profitable. Thus, tobacco companies use their marketing expenditures to promote smoking. Their main objective is to encourage people to start smoking. According to Federal Trade Commission (FTC), in 2003, cigarette companies increased their product marketing and promotional spending to $15.15 billion, while lowering their spending on youth smoking prevention programs to $72.9 million. In other words, tobacco companies spent more than 200 times on product marketing than on prevention (Schmidt,2013).In addition to first reason there is not complete focusing and enough effort. Most advertisements are parent-targeted. They forget that there is a huge percent of youth smoking. However, parent-targeted ads are insufficient in terms of their narrative and executional style. When designing an advertising campaign, at least four important issues must be addressed: the message content(what to say), the executional style(how to say),the target audience(whom to say it and hence, which media to choose),and budget (Pechmann&Reib...

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...sons and results seriously and objectively.

REFERENCES

Websites:

• Schmidt,L.(2013).Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.Retrieved May 6,2014,from http://www.tobaccofreekids.org/research/factsheets/pdf/0302.pdf

• Pechmann,C.,Zhao,G.,Goldberg,M.E.,Reibling,E.T.(2003).What to Convey in Antismoking Advertisement for Adolescent: The Use of Protection Motivation Theory to Identify Effective Message Themes.Retrieved May 6,2014,from http://www.scenesmoking.org/research/trdrp3jm.pdf

Articles:

• Pechmann,C.&Reibling,Ellen T.(n.d.).Anti-Smoking advertising campaigns targeting youth:case studies from USA and Canada.p.117

• Siepmann,James P.(1999).Smoking Does Not Cause Lung Cancer.Journal of Theoretics,1(4),p.2

• Hesami,Z.,Alvanpour,A.,Kashani,Babak S.,Tafti,Saeed F.,Heydari,Gholam R.(2010).Severity of Nicotine Withdrawal Sypmtoms after Smoking Cessation.Tanaffos.9(1).pp.42-47