Folks knew even before the famous 1964 Surgeon General's report what cigarettes did to a smoker's lungs. Turned them black.
But all these years later antismoking groups are still coming up with new and imaginative ways to strike horror into the minds of smokers with images of lungs damaged by cigarettes.
Here's yet another, perhaps the most graphic yet, and it comes from India, the work of Six Inches Communication for a group called Courage India, an anti-smoking group in Mumbai.
As with so many alternative media campaigns, it sprung from a simple observation.
“Most roadside cigarette shops in India have a device for consumers to light cigarettes, be it a burning coil of rope or an electrically powered coil,” says Pravin Shah, creative director at Six Inches. “We felt that this was the best place to drive home an unconventional and hard-hitting message.”
Here's what the agency came with: a cigarette lighter in the form of oversized human lungs. A smoker lights his cigarette by putting it against a coil on either lung and pressing a button on the side of the lung that heats the coil to a red glow.
“We thought that the best place to remind a smoker forcefully about the dangers of smoking was to do it as soon as he lights up,” Shah says.
The idea of lighting one's cigarette from a human lung is certainly a turnoff. But to add the effect, the continual lighting of cigarettes against the coil leaves a residue of smoke and tar, causing the lungs to blacken over time, first near the coil but then in a wider and wider area.
The lung lighters first appeared at street side cigarette booths across India back in December, and the campaign is still running.
The campaign has been was picked up by local and international media, and it's also increased traffic to Courage India’s site.
But the big impact was with smokers who used the lung lights. Says Shah: "There were many smokers observed near the device, chatting, pointing to it and commenting on how this was something that they knew, but seeing it in front of them made them uncomfortable about their habit."
