Latest NYC Smoking Ad Unnerves Viewers (Again)

Child actors are made to demonstrate emotion all the time, and I'm sure techniques like these are used to manipulate these actors--they would have to be. The critics can't take how gut-wrenching the ad is.

Donny Deutsch? He solved my tax problems for just twenty dollars! TWENTY DOLLARS!

Certainly these ads are gross/upsetting, but these are the facts of life. Easy enough to ignore until it's your everyday.

I hate these. I really do.

I know smoking is bad, that's why I ration my cigarettes and keep it to a pack a week. i've kept that up for years. It's hard not to smoke when you're in college. I don't plan on smoking forever, I know that I wont smoke when I have children.

I mean, shit, whenever I have a cigarette and walk by a child, I walk farther away and hold my breath.

I'm not ready to quit now. I like smoking. I enjoy my cigarettes. If I didn't like them, why would I consume them? I don't want to quit and nothing is going to make me quit until I am good and ready. That is just how it is for me.

I remember being 8 years old in the early eighties when I learned, thanks to the comments of one of my teachers, that smoking cigarettes could cause cancer. My father was a heavy smoker and I became immediately concerned. I would tell him repeatedly what my teacher told me but he never listened (or simply could not because of the addiction). 20 years later I lost him to lung cancer and, even though I was an adult already, I could not help feeling inside like the little kid in this ad. I did not cry when he died, but two days latter while in mass celebrated with his body present, I could not contain the tears anymore. To my surprise, I did not cry because he had died, but because my mother was left alone and my younger brother, his favorite, no longer had a father.

great ad!

I believe that kids who are exposed to second hand smoke can be addicted to tobacco themselves. They don't have a chance.

Geez, you have to wonder what they said to the kid to make him cry like that...

How about an ad where a girl is talking on her cell phone and walking down a crowded sidewalk flicking her cigarette carelessly into the wind while burning hot ashes fall into baby carriages?

Often you'll see conservatives bitching about losing our "freedom" if you have the nerve to tell them they can't smoke in the car with their kids.

It's not Conservatives who bitch and moan about civil liberties; it's libertarians, who often pull the "freedom card" whenever a law threatens to curb something they like or force them to acknowledge some form of social responsibility. If they sound like conservatives, it's because they've gotten lame and taken a page out of their handbook by scapegoating liberals for everything.

Doughboys in World War I called cigarettes "coffin nails" and that was 90 years ago.

Addicts are rarely guilted into giving up a drug, which this ad tries to do.

That kid seriously looks like Rue McClanahan.

Hmm, a Golden Girls fan - I won't make any "judgements" based on that...

Freddynyc: LOL. Your judgments would likely be correct.

I don't smoke and never have, but this ad seriously freaks me out every time it comes on!

Could this be another agency expense like "I Love New York" paid to an Atlanta, Georgia advark? I think it doesn't look like NYC at all, but I find often things that purport to by NYC aren't, maybe it's Vancouver? Canada? Where they also grow tobacco? Don't really see the connection, maybe a Weegee shot of a burning building would work better for affect...

Did you bother to read the article? It was commissioned by an Australian anti-cancer group, and was repurposed by New York. New York merely paid for the rights to the ad, not the production.

I think, or it was the years of smoke in my eyes, I stopped smoking using the nicotine gum from New Zealand, half the price of US gum even with airmail, the article was in a shorter form when I wrote that. I read the Sunday "Daily News" this afternoon and learned it was from Australia. It might be an addendum?

I didn't mean to sound flip either. Alarming statistics I saw on our US troops consumption of cigarettes in Iraq. Way above the average of the general population. That was a few years ago though. Maybe it's changed. K-rations in WWII often had a few "looseies" (cigarettes) in them. Today MRE's, some with tiny Tabasco bottles, don't come with them in the actual meal I believe.

I once studied film with Paul Sharits who sort of showed that the words on film are as good as dialog in aural language. If you follow the words in this ad they show "East West" and just behind the "tyke" "Hydrant" and "Hose Reel" at least as I recall seeing it again during WCBS news last night 11:00-11:30. These words are not usually in my culture's printed public display as shown, that I think is why I thought it was from somewhere else, and think if NYC wanted one it could make one for itself.

parents who smoke don't give a shit about their kids or humanity. If they did they wouldn't be smoking.

yes. I am the perfect weight for my height and I don't drink at all. I'm not self- righteous, just righteous.

Are you the perfect weight for your height? Do you have more than three drinks per week? Be careful of your self-righteous condemnations of others... one day you WILL be on the other end of that equation.

if someone is overweight or drinks too much, that doesn't affect MY health. If someone smokes in front of me, it DOES affect my health.

My parents exposed me to second hand smoke for the first 15 years of my life, and I have a hard time forgiving them for their selfish behavior.

Great ad. It gets the point of course.

It's the saddest ad I've ever seen, and I'm not even much of a kid person.

I did lose a parent to cancer that began as oral cancer, and the evidence pointed to cigarettes as the catalyst. The first appearance was in the mid-80s, when information on cigarette health risks was still not very mainstream (and she had already quit a few years before). Who knows if this kind of evidence was available in the 70s (when quitting might have been more beneficial in her case), but locked away by big tobacco companies.

Often you'll see conservatives bitching about losing our "freedom" if you have the nerve to tell them they can't smoke in the car with their kids. No one is trying to take your personal liberties away, but the kid doesn't have a say in the matter. We are all aware of the risks involved with smoking, drinking, fatty foods, etc. and should be able to do as we please, provided we're at least AWARE of the possible consequences. I've never been a smoker, but am not in the least judgmental if people chose to do so (as long as you keep the smell to a minimum at work, please). However, with access to such damning evidence, you'll find that more people at least have the desire to quit. This ad will hopefully help more people take that first step, and continue to undo more of big tobacco's damage in their eagerness to suppress information.

ummm -- warning labels went on cigarettes in 1966 -- It was old news by the 70's.

You guys should watch Mad Men :D