This campaign is just plain creepy. The Washington State Health Department’s Tobacco Prevention and Control Program is running a series of TV ads viewable on the AshtrayMouth website that are basically Fear Factor meets Chucky meets the Truth campaign. Though the premise is that kissing a smoker is as gross as kissing an ashtray, they take it way beyond that.
In the ads, with a spooky music box playing in the background, the expressionless, mute doll children stuff disgusting things like dead rats and cat hairballs into their mouths while putting the moves on their girl/boyfriends, who then leave without comment.
On the website, if you have the stomach for it, you can also play a game that involves selecting various disgusting items like worms, rotten tomatoes, dirty socks and cockroaches, then putting them into the mouth of the creepy doll head of your choice. The items splatter all over the dolls’ faces as they eat and we then see a comment that says something like, “Yum, smoker breath!”
Now, I know that I’m not part of the target audience for this ad. And my first reaction was to be viscerally repulsed and want to get away from the website as quickly as possible. So if this campaign was developed using a social marketing approach and found to be effective with the youth it is targeted toward — who have grown up watching people eat bugs on Fear Factor — then more power to them for taking this unorthodox angle. I can’t stand this campaign, but it may be an illustration of the principle I often espouse that it doesn’t matter what you think of a campaign if you are not a member of the target audience. What matters is how they respond to it.
Let’s hope, for the sake of all the Washingtonian grown-ups who may come across this campaign, that the kids are responding.
Nedra helps nonprofits and public agencies create positive change on health and social issues through social marketing and transmedia storytelling strategies at Weinreich Communications since founding the company in 1995. She helps organizations make a difference for the populations they serve by strategically designing programs that draw on state-of-the-art behavior change techniques, digital media approaches and the power of stories. 
