Us smokers are used to 'shock tactics' to 'raise awareness' of the dangers of of our habit ("What? These are bad for me? I thought they were full of vitamins and stuff"), but this campaign from Brazil, via Contagious, sets the bar pretty high :
An anti-smoking campaign by F/Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi in Sao Paulo brings new meaning to the maxim the medium is the message. A one-minute film recreates images of war - like tanks and bombs dropping from aircraft - to drive home the message that ‘smoking kills more’. The message is echoed in print ads where images of Adolf Hitler and Osama Bin Laden are made from cigarettes. A street art element – where passersby gape as 13,000 cigarettes transform into an image of Hitler before their eyes - has also been uploaded onto Flickr. Brazilian insurance company Unimed funded the campaign
Quite apart from the question of what next for anti-smoking campaigns, it's clear that the agency responsible haven't heard of the logical fallacy known as the argumentum ad Hitlerum. A phrase first coined by the ethicist Leo Strauss in 1950, a explanation of which can be found here.
The fallacy is easy to spot, and has a pretty clear conclusion : In any given debate, the first person to compare their opponent's position to that of Hitler or the Nazis has, in all likelihood, lost the argument.
Off for a ciggie now.
-- Toby
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