English is FUNtastic: 09/01/2012

11.9.12

An interactive guide to destroying your body with cigarettes

(click on the picture above)

In the fight to prevent teen smoking, it’s sometimes hard to decide which consequence to focus on. Cancer? It’s probably decades away. Fertility? They’re trying not to conceive, thanks. Appearance? Sure, it might break through. But isn’t that rather superficial?

It’s also a challenge to get the tone right. Shock ads can (and often do) backfire. A positive approach is great, but does it address something substantive?

This interactive digital campaign by Helsinki’s 359 attempts to do it all. It offers interactive male and female bodies with a simple slider that allows the user to visualize health or illness in the bodily systems of their choice.

The agency posted this explanation on Ads of The World:

Do you remember the pictures of black lungs we were shown at school? Tobacco Body is exactly the same thing done for the iPad age. It is a tool for teachers to show how tobacco changes our bodies. We’ve been working with Cancer Society of Finland since the inception of our agency cracking the same problem: How do we get teenagers to think critically about smoking? This time we thought about the school world and soon realized that those pictures in the books are still the same. Isn’t it time for an update? Can’t technology make the shock effect more shocking?

Especially when it comes to impotence: