The graphics are part of who and what they are. Calif. Canada and other countries do have such bans, but Sheila Banks, media affairs director for Philip Morris USA, says the bans do not cut youth smoking rates. Finland, for example, has the world's highest rate of smoking among teenage boys despite a dozen years without tobacco advertising, she says. The harder you tell them not to do something the more they want to do it. Pertschuk's group uses that fact to turn tobacco ads inside out.
Children hate to be manipulated.
You're not going to get to kids by talking about the danger or the smell. But no one wants to be associated with a brand name that's ridiculed. In the adult world, no one wants to be associated with a brand promoting itself to children. That fact is helping DOC get tobacco ads off popular Rocky Mountain ski slopes. The Jackson Hole Ski Resort at Teton Village in Wyoming is removing Marlboro flags from a coin-operated racecourse there after DOC surveyed all the fourth and fifth graders in town, says DOC member Brent Blue, MD, a family practitioner in Jackson Hole.