The Mound - #42 - How to Quit Vaping

Welcome to The Mound, a weekly newsletter in which we at Good One Creative pitch— for free — our solutions to the world’s problems.

The Government has acknowledged that old advertising methods are not having the same effect on GenZ; whilst we all miss the anti-smoking ads of old - the sponges wrung of tar, the fatty gunk getting squeezed like toothpaste from a dead man’s aorta - apparently such methods just won’t work against today’s blasted, vaping kids!

The good news is they’ve done their research. After an exhaustive investigation into the youth of today, the Government has a plan to save these kids from the perils of a vaping addiction. You can watch the spot here.

When it comes to advertising, there’s only one question worth asking: Will it work?

In such a case as this ad, though, another question is required - a question before the question: Well, what are they trying to do?

I call this an anti-vaping campaign because, well, that’s what the Government told me to call it - and I for one enjoy the Government’s instructions; they provide me with comfort and structure in an otherwise lawless and vacuous existence. Hence my confusion - my concern, even. What do you, the Government, want me to do?

Let’s review the end line of the spot: “Maybe it’s time we ask - why are we still doing this?”

This ad does not want me to quit vaping. It wants to know why I’m vaping? The voiceover, read in a slightly more jovial or curious tone, could belong to a genuinely interested aunt or a co-worker, someone who is about to ask me for my vape.

This is not an anti-vaping ad. This is a… a, I don’t know, small-talk.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, the only way to change behaviour is to scare people straight - and then to hit them over the head, over and over again with an unrelenting barrage of equal consistency and terror. To get teenagers to quit vaping, we’ll need to find something that scares them as much as cancer scares adults.

Here’s how we fix it:

I’m not surprised that focus group testing revealed teenagers care about mental health. Focus groups are great at establishing common ground - but only a very particular flavour of common ground; public, speakable, common ground.

Imagine you are 16 years-old and you are sat in a boardroom with nine other teenagers, none of whom you’ve met before this session. Up front is a strange, smiley adult and behind them is a one-way mirror that is just so obviously there, you wonder if it’d be less distracting for the executives behind it to just lay on the floor beside you, loosely covered by the unfurled pages of a newspaper. The smiley facilitator then claps their hands and goes on to ask you leading, open-ended questions for which “there are no wrong answers”. What would a 16 year-old you do in this situation? Relax? Engage? Delve into your subconscious so as to disclose your deepest fears to the group? Or would you simply grit your teeth and say just enough to qualify for the gift voucher the recruiter promised (which they’ll probably give to you anyway)?

It’s my experience that situations in which there are no wrong answers tend to produce some of the most boring or at least predictable discussions imaginable, as participants lack the incentive to say anything other than the bare minimum, to reveal anything that might diminish their standing i.e. exactly what we’re after.

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Unfortunately, I’m not allowed to forget my first cigarette (vapes didn’t exist then) - which technically wasn’t my first, or mine, even. Not really.

Watching me fumble at the wrong end of a Marlboro Gold from Thailand, a cooler girl said to me, “You don’t smoke.”

I told her I did, that I loved “to smoke cigarettes”.

“No, you don’t,” she said.

I then set fire to the filter and promptly wretched the better half of my internal organs onto the side of our host’s home.

The cooler girl went back inside and I went home soon after to begin the work of burning her embarrassed look onto the inside of my eyelids.

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There’s not a teen alive who’d offer a story like that to a room full of strangers and their microphones. I can say that with confidence because, if one did exist, we’d have done a lot better than, ‘Why are We Still Doing This?’ We’d have understood (read: remembered) that way more important to a teen than mental health, than climate change, than social justice, is the hormonal armageddon taking place inside of their bodies and their raging hope/fear of interacting with whatever sex their interested in. Understanding this, we’d have then Googled just two words: