Pictorial health warnings can go up in smoke
The World No Tobacco Day is upon us (May 31st). The Cancer Patients Aid Association (CPAA), in association with WHO and the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, has organized a competition to create new pictorial health warnings for cigarette packs. The winning entries may find their way on to cigarette packs in India.
It made me curious about how effective the existing warnings are, especially the graphic ones that take up half the surface of cigarette packs abroad. In the book Buyology, author and consumer behaviourist Martin Lindstrom describes a research study: A sample of British and American smokers had their brains scanned while being shown a series of pack warnings, including the ones with gruesome images of diseased hearts or lungs.
The results were startling. The warnings stimulated the nucleus accumbens in the brain, aka ‘the craving spot’. Which means tobacco warnings actually heighten smokers’ urge to smoke! That probably explains why millions continue to light up despite the overwhelming argument against it.
The winning warnings from the CPAA competition would have to take a radical approach to short-circuit the craving spot and knock some sense into smokers’ heads.
T-MOBILE: IT DOESNT'T GET IGGER THAN THIS
It happened at London’s Trafalgar Square. Over 13,000 gathered on April 30 and sang that nostalgia-evoking Beatles hit, Hey Jude. Young and old, Asian, black and white sang together, swayed together, connected in this collective act.
The good feelings participants experienced might have led them to the warm-fuzzy realisation that ‘life’s for sharing’ which, not coincidentally, is the tag-line of cellular communication company T-Mobile which orchestrated the event.
T-mobile had sent out text messages, put up flyers and posters before-hand inviting people to Trafalgar Square. When they arrived they were given microphones. The words of Hey Jude were projected on a billboard. At first they sang falteringly, hesitantly but soon warmed up and by the time they reached the characteristic na na na na na nas of the song they were belting it out.
The event was filmed. The footage was quickly edited into a TV commercial and premiered on the TV show Britain’s Got Talent and simultaneously on T-Mobile’s Youtube channel. So was it an event? A TV commercial? Viral marketing? A moment of catharsis in a recession-ravaged economy? Whatever it was, it was a great idea. It made a whole lot of people feel a part of the brand and a part of something special that went beyond advertising. It certainly doesn’t get bigger than this.
Do I hear a desi brand bringing us together at the Gateway of India, taking a sad song to make us feel better?
(The author is Executive Creative Director, South Asia, Ogilvy & Mather)