Shock and gore propaganda in the UK

The UK’s Department of Health (DoH) is reigniting its turn-of-the-year anti-smoking campaign with a £3 million push designed to provoke ‘disgust’ among television viewers, according to a story by Lara O’Reilly in Marketing Week.

This year’s ‘smokefree’ initiative from the DoH’s executive body, Public Health England, includes the ‘new news’ that smoking can be linked to damage to the brain.

It is said to follow up on research published in the New England Journal of Medicine that apparently found smokers were twice as likely to die from a stroke than were non-smokers.

The campaign, which launched yesterday, shows how smoking ‘dirties the blood’, which then travels around the body affecting the organs. The new push follows last year’s ‘distressing’ campaign that cost £2.5 million and drew 165 complaints from viewers, though it was later cleared by the Advertising Standards Authority.