The Quitline ad in question shows children pretending to "smoke" their crayons. Photo / YouTube, Quitline
Quitline is running a television commercial depicting little children pretending to "smoke" their crayons.
Targeted at adults, the advertisement intends to send strong messages about how grown-ups who smoke should question the poor examples they're setting their own children.
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Quitline had presumably not intended that preschoolers might copy the behaviour of the children shown in the anti-smoking advertisement.
At heart the campaign is poor role modelling. The hope is that smoking adults might kick the habit with the interests and wellbeing of future generations in mind. It's a worthy aim - one that, surely, few people would disagree with. But when it also ostensibly glorified smoking in the eyes of small children it attracted criticism.
A concerned mother turned to Facebook to raise the fact that her four-year-old, who lived in a smoke-free household and had seen the advertisement in question "multiple times", now "thinks she is super cool pretending to smoke her crayons/colour pens".
This mother asked Quitline if they had considered the impact such an advertisement may have on children who had not previously been exposed to smoking. She also noted the irony in the fact that an anti-smoking campaign was the "root cause of my innocent four year old thinking it's a great idea".
Quitline responded that "we have been careful to place the ads only during adult programming. If you think your children have seen these ads during children's programs then we're happy to follow up." Ouch.
Presumably they're saying that if the child in question saw the advertisement it was because she had stayed up late to watch adult programming. The message was clear. If children went to bed at a reasonable hour or had their viewing habits monitored then the situation would not have arisen. Quitline had neatly placed the onus back on the parent.
The same issue had already been considered by the Advertising Standards Authority in October following a complaint from a concerned viewer. In addition to the faux smoking, the advertisement also "showed one of the children offering the other a 'ciggy' from a crayon packet".
The complaint was not upheld. It seemed to boil down to the fact that because the children were not the target market they were not the most significant stakeholders in this equation.
There was a good reason that children were used in this execution. Evidently people in the target group "are not overly concerned about the long term effects on their health or the cost of cigarettes, they are very concerned about children taking up smoking and feel guilty that they are role-modelling this behaviour."
Ironically, by its very nature, this child-based argument is potentially doing a disservice to other children - that is, the children who happen to see the advertisement.
And it quickly became clear how early in the day this advertisement had played.
According to the Complaints Board, "while the advertisement played late in the afternoon, it aired during the Maori news programme, Te Karere, which was not children's programming."
It may not have been children's programming but it's reasonable to expect that children might be watching television in the late afternoon. It's quite a separate proposition to the suggestion the children saw it late at night when they ought to have been in bed.
According to the Complaints Board, "the majority of people would understand the advertisement was about encouraging adults to quit smoking, rather than encouraging children to start." Yet in the timeslot concerned a reasonable proportion of viewers may well have been naive children in no position to understand such nuances and make such judgements.
In fact two of the children canvassed in Quitline's own research involving twenty school-age children "thought the TVC was telling children that they should smoke".
And that really is the point the mother on Facebook was making. It's difficult to accept that in this instance the future generation is effectively considered collateral damage in a campaign targeted towards an audience believed to be concerned with the welfare of the future generation. There's something a little warped about that scenario. And it's very odd that a body charged with helping people quit should be relaxed about anyone taking away a pro-smoking message from its communications.
‘Mum had lived and died with this secret,’ says writer Mary Garden.