In one harrowing spot, a young woman with bloody, cracked lips and gums gives a hoarse testimonial of life with oral cancer. In response to complaints, the HPB rescheduled its commercials to air only after 8pm and repositioned several of its bus posters.
The new anti-smoking campaign is just the latest example of how scare tactics are increasingly being used in Asia. Perhaps ad agencies have taken a cue from their counterparts in Australia and Canada, where such goriness is a common sight in public service announcements. But given the quieter conservatism underlying many Asian cultures, do scare tactics cross the line in Asia?
That is precisely the intent, according to Crush Advertising chief executive officer Palani Pilai, who helmed one of the HPB’s early anti-smoking campaigns. “In order for them to work, they need to be effectively scary to do the job,” says Pillai. “Quite a few scare tactics have failed because they failed to go the whole hog.”
“If it’s hard-hitting, so be it,” agrees Randall Glennon, general manager of Grey Melbourne, the agency behind the graphic, award-winning ‘Reconstruction’ TVC for an anti drink-driving campaign.
“It doesn’t matter whether you’re in Singapore or Sydney — we’re all confronted by the prospect of road trauma and its repercussions. However, you can easily cross the line into the gratuitous, where you get into shock value for shock value’s sake.”
Pillai notes that much depends on what these scare tactics are being used for. “If they are used to bring about a positive change to a social ill such as smoking, drug abuse or spousal violence, then it is perfectly suited. There’s nothing un-Asian about that.”
Furthermore, the HPB campaign might have fared better with Glennon’s advice on media planning: “You need to make sure the communications are highly relevant. For example, we wouldn’t place ‘Reconstruction’ at 5:30pm. It has to be discreetly targeted to the appropriate audience.”
Hari Ramanathan, creative planner at Y&R Brands, is no fan of scare tactics, but does agree that they can work once the target audience has been properly identified: “Scare tactics work when you’re trying to scare me about someone I love, ” he points out, citing a recent Dettol ad in India, which addressed the issue of bacteria and children.
“Moms never get scared about themselves, but they are naturally protective of their children. This is the only one I can think of that worked.”
But have scare tactics shown any real results? In the case of the Singapore smoking spots, HPB cited a five-fold increase in phone calls to its smoking Quitline just a week after the campaign broke in March.
But since such scare tactics began in 2003, with the introduction of images of diseased body parts featured on cigarette packs, smoking levels have fallen by less than seven per cent. And one might argue that the decline had more to do with greater cigarette taxes and restrictions than on the increasing shock value of the ads — or the effectiveness of such ads.
One creative director, who has used scare tactics on several occasions, even claims that the research behind such campaigns is usually thin: “Agencies either do these ads for free or very little pay. Thus, there’s little to no research involved to prove how effective they really are,” he says.
