Since a century we’ve seen a lot of campaigns against smoking however, most of them weren’t effective, smokers still smokes and a lot of teenagers are starting to smoke too (you can refer to my post “Smoke, Smoke, Smoke” below). After banning smoking in public areas in Lebanon, a lot of people were against this law. Rare are the people who followed it for different reasons. I was surprised for the fact that a lot of educated people are with smoking, therefore I wanted to do a campaign of a different kind using reversed psychology, the main topic in today’s advertising strategies.
First I’ve started my intervention with two teaser campaigns aiming to empathize with smokers rather than attacking them, showing them that we know that they really understand the consequences of smoking but it’s hard for them to quit:
“I know people think I’m not educated, but they don’t understand how hard it is to stop”, “I know people think I don’t care, but they don’t understand it calms me down”, “I know that people think I’m killing myself, but they don’t understand it’s a great companion”.
Later , I announced a competition: “SMOKE AS MUCH AS YOU CAN”. I invited people to enjoy smoking and try to smoke the most number of cigarettes at one time. The message is getting smokers to see clearly their smoking attitudes and to think again about quitting cigarettes. I was inspired by the campaign “Sheyef halak” on LBCI, which I consider a very successful example of using reversed psychology in advertising. Hanging posters of the competitors smoking with grades and tags saying “I’m cool”, “I have 100/100” and so, will show them how ridiculous they appear . Unfortunately, the program coordinator of the university didn’t allow us to have the competition or hang the posters on campus. So, it was held on Facebook, people started to post pictures of themselves smoking. You can check the pageAs Much As You Can and the event Smoke As Much As You Can. In university, most of the students thought that the competition was a prank! Some of their reactions was: “Are you trying to kill people?”, some of them removed posters, others were complaining to the program coordinator about this campaign! For the smokers, many were willing to participate and take the challenge while others said they wouldn’t do it, because they know how harmful it is, and, it’s a waste of cigarettes!! 😛
You can check our video to see student’s reactions on this topic.
All in all, visual perception does not deal only with graphical images but also with the psychology of humans behind it. Advertising campaigns should focus on all the aspects of visual perception as well as the current needs of the society in order to be fully successful.
A La Costa 