Written by: Panagioti Tsiamis

YouTube is a wonderful place to hide over the holidays. With 300 hours of content being uploaded every minute, there is undoubtedly something for everyone. However, there is also a catch: incessant ads. For every five videos that I watched online over break, two contained ads that I wasn’t able to skip. For every three of those ads, two of them were sponsored by the FDA, specifically to do with nicotine.

We get it, smoking kills [insert foreboding music here].

The news is neither surprising nor revolutionary. This fact has been ingrained into us from a young age, with warnings issued from as early as elementary school and far into adulthood. Tobacco usage has declined within the last decade at an astounding rate. Yet for whatever reason, these ads seem to have only increased with alarming (and obnoxious) frequency.

Launched in 2014, the “Real Cost” campaign aimed to educate at-risk youth about the harmful effects of smoking. Admittedly, the campaign has made an impact, reportedly preventing up to 587,000 youth ages 11 to 19 from initiating smoking between February 2014 and November 2016. But at what cost?

The aesthetic of the campaign has remained the same throughout the majority of 2019, and (from my personal experience) it lingers yet in 2020: horror... or at least an attempt at it. On their website, the organization states, “We’re not here to tell you what to do. The ‘Real Cost’ gives you what you need to know – real facts, so you can make your own decision.”

Yet their current strategy seems anything but that, resorting primarily to feeble scare tactics. Their ads consist of gaping neck wounds, boiling tubs of acid, rotting sentient teeth, stereotypically edgy teens, and an obnoxious amount of screaming. The less dramatic ads feature tooth extractions and videos titled “Imagine this was your [insert body part here]” featuring the mutilation of grocery store meat. As a whole, the campaign teeters on the line between somewhat disturbing and awkwardly laughable (for reference, please be sure to check out their commentary on vaping, in which a magician magically transforms a vape into a cigarette).

“How is this supposed to dissuade anyone from smoking?” you might ask yourself. I know I did. For some people, perhaps it does, but for me, it provides little more than annoyance.

We live in an age of fear-mongering, and not solely to do with the dangers of tobacco usage. Fear-based strategies are, if anything, heavily encouraged. In researching the topic, I came across countless articles detailing how to successfully make use of shock advertising to drive consumer behavior. This ploy, first used most notably in Listerine’s 1920s lucrative marketing campaign (see image below), has quickly integrated itself into our lives. The evocation of fear is now present in politics, education, religion, and media as a whole. Scare tactics are used to sway people one way or another, preying on their biases, insecurities and personal beliefs. Through scare tactics, a populace can be driven toward the purpose of any greater power, be it helpful or destructive. It doesn’t matter.

Even if the “Real Cost” campaign was successful in its use of fear-mongering, could we call it a just or beneficial long-term strategy? Even if it was done in the name of saving lives? Smoking kills, after all. Or are we just creating a culture of fear? Mistrust. Bias. Is that a culture anyone would want to truly be a part of?

It’s easy to call for a logical and just approach to rhetoric, one in which scare tactics, ad hominem attacks, and other argumentative fallacies are rendered obsolete. The reality is far more difficult. As is the process of presenting an argument devoid of faults. If we ever hope to produce a well-educated culture of trust, justice, and truth, we must be willing to take the longer road. The FDA and other organizations hoping to inspire change mustn't result in a purely pathos-inducing strategy. The brief shock experienced by an at-risk youth while browsing the web only lasts so long and, after seeing the same fear-mongering at work twenty more times, the influence the ad had is quickly lost if not wholly resented.