Anti-Youth-Smoking Ads May Have Opposite Effect

[MountainLaurel]

Surprise!

The surest way to get teenagers to do something is to tell them not to.

That principle appears to apply to some smoking-prevention ads created by tobacco companies, a new study has found.

Youngsters 12 to 17 were less likely to see smoking as harmful and had stronger intentions to smoke after the airing of television ads that urged parents to talk to their children about not lighting up, according to the study to be published in December in the American Journal of Public Health. The slogan of the national campaign, begun in 1999 by cigarette industry leader Philip Morris USA, was "Talk. They'll listen."

Researchers gauged the effect of the ads by analyzing television ratings from 75 U.S. media markets and data from an annual national survey of eighth-, 10th- and 12th-graders from 1999 to 2002.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/31/AR2006103101158.html

:rofl:

[azurnoir]

1. Gee, who da' thunk? n/t

[Redbear]

2. I've read they studied all the Just Say No stuff from the 80's

And everything they found that did not work, they developed their teen-smoking campaigns using those ideas.

[RaleighNCDUer]

3. The ads were offered up by the tobacco companies as part of the

tobacco suit -- they were to fund anti-smoking ads. But the ads are worse than useless. Parents who talk to their kids will talk about smoking, and be ignored. Parents who don't talk to their kids are not going to be influenced to do so by the ads. The ads are subliminally directly targetting kids, not targetting parents at all -- do they show the parent in the majority of the shots, or the kids (or the BAD kids) smoking? Bad kids smoke. Bad kids are cool. Cool kids smoke.

The quickest way to reduce smoking would be to eliminate ALL advertising, pro and con. TV, magazine, billboard, posters, everything.