Truth (advertising)
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"Truth" is an anti-smoking advertising campaign which uses televised advertisements and internet websites such as TheTruth.com to deride the tobacco industry.
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[edit] Overview and history
The earliest Truth commercials focused on the marketing practices of what they called "Big Tobacco" and past controversies of tobacco companies. Advertisements included a three-year-old being fitted with a "hidden camera" as he walks around a store, in an attempt to indicate that tobacco advertising has often been placed where it can easily be seen, even at a low eye level. Truth has also had people storming the offices of an unnamed tobacco company and marching up to executives with a lie detector. Another ad featured a paper shredder, with the implication being that tobacco companies have destroyed important documents that would have connected them to scandals.
It is important to note that TheTruth.com fails to show any of the official documents by tobacco companies that support the claims for their commercials.
[edit] Formation
Truth was originally created in 1997 by advertising agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky as part of a statewide anti-smoking initiative in Florida. In 1999, the campaign was taken to the national stage by the American Legacy Foundation, a nonprofit anti-smoking organization. Its ads are financed by the tobacco industry, stemming from an agreement between tobacco companies and state attorney generals in which large companies, in particular Phillip Morris, agreed to fund the ads. There is also a clause that states that Truth's advertising cannot "vilify" the tobacco companies, one that has been invoked to cause Truth to change its ads on a few occasions. [1]
[edit] List of ad campaigns
[edit] Shards O'Glass
A parody of a tobacco company's business practices of discouraging tobacco use, it features a popsicle company called Shards O'Glass which sells popsicles covered in broken glass, while simultaneously promoting their dangers.
[edit] Fair Enough
A fictional sitcom broadcast in television commercials, complete with a laugh track. Features actors playing what appear to be tobacco company executives talking about how they will sell their products. The show is based on actual tobacco company documents and meetings. The endline of each commercial is "It would be funnier if it weren't true."
[edit] Infect truth
A series of commercials shot documentary style. Each thirty second ad attempted to show the hazardous effects of smoking. (In one ad, a beach is bombarded with planes with banners that display all the dangerous chemicals found in cigarettes.) This campaign also won a 2003 EFFIE award for advertising. [2]
[edit] 1200
A commercial featuring a protest that includes 1200 Truth correspondents lining up in front of a tobacco company and playing dead. The number 1200 is published as the annual toll of tobacco in the US. The CDC and the WHO corroborate this number. This Baker Smith directed ad by has won many advertising awards for its effectiness. [citation needed] Watch it here.
[edit] Welcome To Crazyworld
Presented in a circus format and features some "amazing but true" facts about smoking. The basic theme of the campaign is that tobacco companies are not expected to follow any rules - they do not list the ingredients that go into cigarettes and, while most other products would be recalled at the slightest sign of danger to consumers, thousands of people die every year from smoking. One commercial featured Truth supporters performing conjuring tricks with grapes and explain that in 1989 millions of cases of imported fruit were destroyed after small traces of cyanide were found in two grapes, whereas one cigarette contains thirty-three times as much cyanide as the grapes.
[edit] Truth Behind The Curtain
A series of advertisements showed representatives in Times Square stepping out from behind an orange curtain in order to "unveil" the truth about smoking. They were designed to showcase the marketing practices of tobacco companies, particularly where topics such as addiction and health are concerned. One of these was based on the American Legacy Foundation's outrage at "Project Scum" (Sub-Culture Urban Marketing), a leaked document detailing a tobacco company's rejected plan to encourage more homeless people to smoke.
[edit] Connect truth
This campaign aimed to show the "bigger picture" about smoking and "connect" the facts to real people's stories. For the first time, one strand of the campaign focused on the fire hazards caused by cigarettes.
[edit] Focus on the Positives
A commercial in the style of a parody musical with supposed tobacco company executives singing enthusiastically about the product they sell as Truth counteracts this with arguments about the dangers of smoking and the practices of tobacco marketing. Example: "Just stay focused on the positive! Every eight seconds a smoker dies, it's becoming routine. But let's stay focused on the positive! Those seven seconds in between."
[edit] Whudafxup?
The latest Truth campaign (as of June 2006) uses the euphemistic slogan "Whudafxup with that?" (which is not read out loud on any commercials, because of its similarity to "What the fuck's up with that?", the phrase upon which the slogan is based) to highlight similar deliberate wordplay that the tobacco industry has used.
The advertisements in this campaign to date:
- The first Whudafxup advertisement highlighted the way that in the 1950s some tobacco companies refused to name cancer as a consequence of cigarette smoking and instead insisted on referring to it as "zephyr".
- In another, a man walks into a mattress store and asks an employee if any of the mattresses would kill him. He then claims that in 1985 a tobacco company vice president suggested "we" should ban sleep, because the majority of people die in their sleep. It is unclear if by "we" he means society as a whole, or the anti-tobacco organizations. Since TheTruth.com does not disclose any of its tobacco documents, it is impossible to know.
- A man is jogging between different clinics looking for help with his addiction to "jogging and M&M's". He later says that tobacco executives claim that the addiction to cigarettes is comparable to that of jogging and M&M's.
- A man walks into a candy store and asks the owner "Do children like your candy?" and "Are the most popular flavors of candy sold chocolate, mint, cherry, strawberry, lime, and vanilla?" then addresses the audience: "Do you think it's coincidence that these are the same exact flavors that tobacco companies have put into their cigarettes?"
- In yet another recent ad, a man sets up a colorful cigarette stand in a park with various cigarette flavor names painted on it, such as "Mocha Taboo" and "Twista Lime," Camel (cigarette) and KOOL (cigarette) flavors. Primarily children come up to him, due to the more exciting style of flavor names used (and probably due to the bright colors of paint used, as well as the fact that it looks like a child's lemonade stand), though the man has to tell them that his products are for adults. The adults that walk by the stand generally ignore his sales offers altogether. The situation witnessed questions the flavor naming strategy used by the tobacco companies if adults are truly their target consumers.
