Advertising Body Calls for Indecent Anti-smoking Ads to be Scrapped

After it sparked outcry and a threat by the French government to ban the publicity, France's advertising regulatory body on Wednesday demanded that a suggestive anti-smoking campaign be scrapped.

"The visuals used suggests scenes of sexual aggression... proposing an ambiguous message to the young public," the ARPP, a self-regulating advertising body said in a statement, calling the campaign a violation "to rules of decency and dignity."

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The deliberately shocking ads show a man pushing a kneeling child's face towards his crotch. Two feature boys and one a girl. The children look fearfully up at him, holding in their mouth a cigarette that appears to protrude from his fly.

Under the image runs the slogan: "Smoking makes you a slave to tobacco."

France's minister for families, Nadine Morano, said she would take measures to get the advert banned on grounds of "public offense to decency."

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"There are other ways to explain to young people that cigarettes make you addicted, at a time when we are fighting against child pornography," she said.

Health minister Roselyne Bachelot called it "inappropriate" and "counter-productive," though she agreed it had become necessary to use "shock images" to discourage the young from smoking.

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The association Non-Smokers' Rights which launched the poster said it was intentionally "shocking and disturbing."

The pressure group Families of France said it had made a formal complaint to advertising standards authorities.

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A spokesman for British American Tobacco in France, Yves Trevilly, denounced the advert for effectively branding tobacco sellers "pedophiles or rapists."

One woman who phoned radio station Europe 1 to complain that the advert was not even comprehensible to the age group it aims to help. Her 12-year-old son "didn't understand it at all," she said.

In a comment posted on the station's website, another commenter insisted: "The shame is not the ad but letting young people fall into the hands of harmful substances."

Source-AFP
TRI