Posted on 03/21/2002 5:48:30 AM PST by Stand Watch Listen
Apparently, health warnings alone are not preventing enough smokers from lighting up. Last week I heard an advertisement on the radio which constitutes a new strange direction in tobacco prevention.
A group calling itself "Campus Invasion" sponsored the ad, which was cloaked in a promotional offer for a free laptop computer. However, instead of listing the health risks experienced by smokers and non-smokers alike, the ad sought to prevent tobacco consumption by focusing on child labor and the environment. This is a big switch.
Anti-tobacco campaigns have taken many forms in recent years, from banning RJ Reynolds's Joe Camel cartoon advertisement to the more recent public service ads featuring thousands of body bags attributed to annual deaths caused by tobacco use. All the while, though, warnings have always cautioned smokers or would-be smokers away from puffing by appealing strictly to self-interest: smoke and you will die or develop cancer, therefore don't smoke. For most Americans this strategy has sufficiently scared them away from tobacco. It worked for me.
Like most Californians, I grew up with a firm lesson from my parents about the dangers of tobacco use. My mother and father would recite what various public service announcements had told them: smoking tobacco can cause cancer, disease and general poor health. For me, this lesson stuck and I never adopted the habit.
But Campus Invasion offers a new strategy-appeals to compassion and altruism. According to its website and partner websites, Campus Invasion is funded by several local and national government agencies, including Health and Human Services Department, American Lung Association and the Tobacco Control Resource Program. Its goal is to curb college-aged smoking. It's a creative campaign in several ways, and is largely funded by California's Proposition 99-passed in 1989 to tax $.25 per pack for tobacco education programs--and San Diego County class action lawsuits against tobacco
companies.
Campus Invasion's latest ad campaign wheedles tobacco consumers to quit smoking, or never develop the habit, by focusing on the plight of children laboring in foreign tobacco farms and on the environmental damage caused by tobacco cultivation.
In short, the anti-tobacco campaign message has changed from "don't smoke lest you die", to "don't smoke lest you exploit children and contribute to global warming." As the website (www.campusinvasion.com) states, "Everything that is done to grow tobacco leaves can hurt the environment, as well as the people that grow it."
Another page on the website features a picture of a sad child over the caption, "Tobacco Farmer: In many countries children are raised to work on tobacco farms." This is a long way from frightening publicity of black lung or graphic images of oral cancer.
This ad campaign marks a substantive strategic shift move in promoting a tobacco-free lifestyle, but a question poses itself-Why the shift in message?
Everything about the advertisement is clever-from the laptop giveaways to the Earth Day celebration at San Diego City College on April 18 to the anti-globalization theme. It all appeals to college students.
At campuses across the nation, fashionable activities-protesting the World Trade Organization, tapping out an email message on your laptop and taking a 'smoke break'-are naturally embraced by politically malleable students itching to dip their toes in the rebellious waters of campus activism.
What other segment of American society could be compelled to quit smoking with appeals to block tobacco's ruinous contribution to "globalization."? Only in United States institutions of higher education.
Campus Invasion's ad piggy-backs on the latest fad for rebellious college students: anti-globalization. This radical movement, which has reared its nasty head at International trade meetings in Genoa, Seattle, New York and Washington, fuses environmentalists, feminists, Marxists and Libertarians to dissent global free trade and corporations. College campuses are where the most active participants in the anti-corporation crusade are recruited.
At college campuses everywhere, student chapters of Amnesty International, National Organization for Women and the United Students Against Sweatshops attract large numbers of youths yearning for "social change". Anti-globalization prophets pass down two pillars of protest: corporations exploit labor and destroy the environment.
Campus Invasion figures that by appealing to college students' anti-globalist and environmental sympathies, they too will reject smoking on these grounds before considering health concerns. Ads like this are provocative and brainy, but miss the mark.
The National Ad Council has also tacked this course during this year's Super Bowl with powerful ads linking drug use to support of terrorist groups producing heroin. Like Campus Invasion, the ads redirected potential risks. Instead of flatly declaring "Just Say No", the ads instruct "Just Say No because if you say yes, you will finance terrorist organizations".
Whatever happened to scaring the wits out of adolescents to discourage drug or tobacco use? Perhaps the new direction in ad strategy signals a societal shift where consumers consider starving Third World tobacco farmers or terrorist organizations before personal health.
Bryan Auchterlonie is Director of University Journalism Programs for the Collegiate Network, a non-profit organization in Wilmington, Del.
Solves the whole 'exploited childrem' problem, and you support American workers and companies in the process.
Someone tell those f@ggots that the computers and radio transmitters they use were built by child slave labor in China.
What good little cookie-cutter people.
Are college students today the most boring, risk-averse, collectivist people in society today or is it my imagination?
I can hardly wait until these whiney little Marxists are running everything.
Look for me - I'll be the old lady on the front porch with a rifle across my knees waiting for the Brigade for the Promotion of Health and Virtue to arrive for that one last weekly session.
ROMPFLMAO! Give 'em your rifle bullets first, will ye?
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