Anti-Smoking Campaigns on Tik Tok

That Truth Ad would’ve been good if it was like “People in college who try cigarettes still smoke 4 years later” and then it’s a guy smoking a cig and referencing dead memes from his college years, still doing the same shit 4 years later.

I don’t smoke because I swallowed a smoke alarm when I was young so if I smoke it’s really loud

The most effective anti-smoking campaign for me growing up (as a millennial) was actually a school assembly. This guy came to my school and didn't talk at all about the health effects of smoking; but rather how terrible and corrupt tobacco companies are. I never had the desire to smoke anyway, but learning that tobacco companies are the ACTUAL devil really drove it home for me.

As someone who works with kids, my number one philosophy is not treat children as adults, but treat them as human beings. They aren’t stupid and they are incredibly good at figuring out when they’re being talked down to.

The best anti-drug message I ever got was from one of my teachers. She passed out the calculators and had us count up how much it costs to smoke a pack a day for a week, a month, or a year. Then she handed out newspaper ads and asked us to cut out all the cool shit we'd rather buy with that amount of money. That stuck with me harder than the photos of black lungs. I didn't have a good grasp of my own mortality, but I understood money well enough to know I'd rather have the iPod.

The most effective anti-smoking ad for me was that every smoker I've ever met says they're trying to quit and not succeeding.

The reason I’ve never done coke is because my guitar teacher very seriously told me that it’s amazing, and if I start, I’ll never want to stop. If they stop underestimating teens, they can actually do some good.

Fun fact: a different anti-vaping campaign (I think it’s called like the facts now or something) made a horror game where you have to go through rooms quickly to escape an insane asylum or be left to rot. It isn’t until the very end though that it tells you that this is what vaping is like.

in 5 more years, when the meme dries off completely, they’ll be saying “Smoking is not pogchamp. What are you, a Big Tobacco simp?”

It's sad but sometimes you just gotta scare the shit out of kids, the real cost was effective as hell

One time we had an anti weed PSA when I was about 16. Shit was real. It didn’t make weed out as the devil, it just showed slowly how weed makes teenagers change priorities and inhibit their success. It was the story of a relatively young lad who inhibited himself in college because he started smoking hella weed. It was the best one I’ve ever seen because it was so realistic

As a little girl in elementary school, they showed us a model of a human mouth that had been smoking vs a healthy mouth. That alone made me know I never wanted to put those cancer sticks near me. No fuzzy tongue and yellow teeth for me please! I don’t see how they expect these tiktok videos to work. Like you said, the facts are the best way to go about anti smoking campaigns. Being cringe just makes kids wanna vape out of spite.

So, fun fact - a lot of if not all tobacco companies are required by law to fund anti-smoking ads, so it’s not uncommon for anti-smoking ads to be used to secretly advertise smoking. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the “this ad is so cringy, I’m going to smoke out of spite” mentality is intentional.

The anti-smoking ads that had the lady with a hole in her neck permanently scarred me as a child. Those were effective.

This is so interesting bc the only Truth ads I see on tiktok are the creepy, vaguely threatening videos that have real facts. This is entirely different, it’s crazy how brands do that and it’s crazy how good the algorithm is that it shows such differently toned things to people who engage in different content

I'm a 16 year old that quit smoking weed, vaping and drinking liquor about like 5 months ago, and I can honestly say that it wasn't any anti-smoking campaign that got me clean, it was myself. I found a passion, which was working out and making music, and now I'm a lot happier than I was. Truth should focus on what to do, rather than what NOT to do, because putting the situation in a positive context and looking for the next step is a lot more effective than just avoiding the negative. There is a way out of addiction.

“You don’t want anti-smoking campaigns to become cringy in kids heads because then vaping becomes cool and not vaping becomes not cool” Truth & D.A.R.E don’t get it tho. You broke it down perfectly, hopefully they see this lol

The most effective anti smoking ads to me personally was “the real cost” ones. There was this one add where the guy doesn’t have enough money for cigarettes and he takes a pair of pliers and pulls out his teeth and another where a girl rips the skin off her cheeks and it was so fucking scary that I think it really made me never want to smoke

I liked Truth's "its a great big world" campaign where they gave some facts about how damaging smoking can be while showing some unsettling Claymation body horror.

I started smoking when I was 14, 14 years ago, after my mom died, from smoking. I quit one week ago tomorrow. I knew how stupid I was being picking it up. I had it in my mind, "I won't be addicted like everyone else." Well, 14 years later I can safely say they are definitely addicting. I stopped cold turkey, and I don't anticipate going back to being a daily smoker, but I definitely can tell I'm probably going to relapse at some point unfortunately. Ugh. I'm sorry Mom.