[1]
If you can’t get people to stop smoking by appealing to their health or their fear/mistrust of large corporations, there’s always the hope of reaching them through vanity. That’s what the European Union has in mind with Nico Market [2], a fake store that sells nicotine-related home and beauty products. According to the Guardian, “each of the [viral ads] promotes a different product [3]—a room-freshener, throat spray, toothpaste and skin cream—with the twist being that the nicotine-based products have adverse effects.” For example, the skin cream turns your complexion ashen [4]. I’m not sure how effective this idea will be as an anti-smoking campaign—it seems like something smokers would laugh at while smoking—but it’s a nice change of pace from hipsters yelling about how tobacco companies lied 30 years ago.
—Posted by David Kiefaber