Images of Children Suffering: Effective Usage of Images in Anti-Smoking Advertisements

When I was younger, I thought it was cool to smoke because all the adults that I knew smoked. I remember the first time I was offered a cigarette. The back parking lot of my high school is where it happened. Everyone back there always had one in their hand, and I was too shy to ask for one, but I always wanted to know what it was like. The day in particular that I was offered one, I took it. After that, I spent about 3 years smoking cigarettes before I realized that it was not as cool as it seemed. The Chilean Corporation Against Cancer has created a wonderful ad that uses a child to represent, mainly, second hand smokes detrimental effect on children, but also the effect that smoking has on all people around you.

The advertisement depicts a young boy who is obviously in severe discomfort. His face displays utter terror as he is suffocated by a bag shaped figure of smoke. The colors are very dark and are used intentionally to make you feel very empty inside when you look at it. The white text contrasts this darkness entirely. It shines brightly with the words, “ Smoking isn’t just suicide, it’s murder.” That is a very effective appeal to the emotions of the viewer. It conveys the message that when you smoke, you’re not just hurting yourself, you’re hurting every other person around you as well. This is an image that burns into the brains of parents. When people have children, they want the best for them. They do not want their child to suffer under any circumstances, yet they still smoke cigarettes while they are around them. According to Obesity, Fitness, and Wellness week, “The ads, which represent a radical departure from traditional methods of speaking to smokers, make an emotional appeal to parents who smoke to quit by featuring children, who, in many ways, stand to benefit the most from a quit attempt.” So, this is a relatively new way of appealing to smokers. Despite that, it has turned out to be the most effective. Children have no say in whether or not they want to be subjected to second hand smoke. It is entirely up to the parents to be smart enough to step away from the cigarettes and give their children the best life that they can have. In regards to an article written by The Nation’s Health, one woman was quoted saying, “During the Sept. 9 telebriefing, former smoker Lisha Hancock said seeing Hall’s throat in the ad made her realize the risk she was at for other cancers such as throat cancer, especially since she developed sore throats from smoking.

But Hancock said it was not only Hall’s ad that inspired her to quit, but her son 5-year-old son Ryley’s reaction to Hall.” The ad she was referencing was an image of of woman speaking through a stoma in her throat that she had to receive due to complications that arose from her smoking habit. Nonetheless, the woman says that she was not only inspired by the woman suffering, but more so because her young son was so stunned by the image. She did not want to become that woman in the advertisement because she saw how horrendous that was to her son. Children can have such a profound ability to make advertisements such as these more effective. They have a perspective that adults fail to consider when they are taking on such habits, and when they do finally see this other side, it really seems to get under their skin.

According to the CDC, “ Ads such as this one featuring a teen with severe asthma, have convinced more than 1 million people to try to quit smoking.” That’s a lot more of a response than other campaigns have been able to achieve. The image of children suffering has a far more significant impact than statistics, or images of adults. I think this type of tactic is wonderful, and I think that the ad of the little boy is a perfect example of a great advertisement.

In contrast, there are quite a few very ineffective attempts at advertising towards smokers. Images that carry absolutely no emotional impact tend to be overlooked by most people who do not plan on ending their habit. The majority of the people that they do not work on are teenagers. They do not have children, so you cannot show them an image of a child and really scare them. They also do not feel as emotional towards the advertisements because most teenagers have so much of their life ahead of them. They are not scared of images that show old people suffering because they have such a long amount of time before they are actually to the point where the smoking will show its deadly effects. According to Young Studies Australia, “A study involving 103,172 students from 48 states in the USA has discovered that television anti-smoking advertisements sponsored by the tobacco industry have little impact on the smoking attitudes and behaviours of 14–18-year-olds. The study also found that ads encouraging parents to discuss smoking with their children were associated with lower perceptions of smoking harm, increased rates of smoking approval and intention to smoke, and a greater likelihood of having smoked recently among the 16–18-year-olds who had viewed them most frequently. According to Cancer Council Victoria researcher Professor Melanie Wakefield, who co authored the study with colleagues from the University of Illinois and the University of Michigan, these findings provide ‘the clearest evidence to date that tobacco-industry-sponsored smoking prevention ads don’t work, and that they are acting as a marketing smokescreen to promote tobacco to youth’.” It’s almost like the teenagers who do see these ads are encouraged by them. I have picked out a particularly bad advertisement that has little to no emotional impact when viewing it. It was created by Alghanim Industries as an attempt to stop people from picking up the habit.

The image is extremely bland, and unappealing to the viewing audience. There is hardly anything on it, and the words are sub-par in getting any sort of message across. It shows a cigarette that is made of people walking. The background is completely blacked out, and the only colors on the page that are not black is the cigarette butt, the people, the words, and the actual logo of the company that put the ad out. Nothing about this stands out in my eyes. The people walking do not even appear to be affected by the two in front that are smoking, which leads the viewer to believe that they actually aren’t. If I saw this advertisement in the magazine I would simply skip over it because nothing draws my eyes in and makes me think about it in any way. Ads like this are never going to work, because even ads with people pulling out their teeth for cigarettes don’t work. People who smoke cigarettes typically do not smoke them because they love them, some definitely do, but most people do it because they have anxiety. They have self esteem issues and anxiety that causes them to feel stressed and in turn smoke cigarettes in order to reduce this stress. Iodine.com state, “If you threaten someone who has little to no confidence they can change their behavior, their anxiety goes through the roof. What do they do? Perhaps turn off the threatening ad, walk away, and light up a cigarette — the very behavior you were trying to prevent. This same principle applies to other coping behaviors, such as eating unhealthy types of food or just too much of it.” Therefore, these types of advertisements are rendered useless because all they do is promote people to go and smoke more in order to ease the anxiety that the ad caused in the first place. They do not appeal to the deep emotions of people like the advertisements with children in them, and will not encourage someone who does not want to quit, to quit.

When I was a kid, the only thing that would have made me not want to smoke, would have been if my parents and all other adults around me did not smoke. Perhaps if they would have imagined me being injured by smoke, that would have influenced their decision to smoke around me, but those types of advertisements just have not been around long enough. I have high hopes that they will help many other parents alter their habits though. Hopefully, there will be more studies on what kind of ads are effective in encouraging smokers to quit sooner rather than later. It’s just a matter of finding a subject that appeals to the deepest emotions of people who smoke. That is truly the only way to actually encourage the decrease of cigarette smoking in the United States.