Better smoke than kiss a girl?

A couple of weeks ago, on the occasion of the World No Tobacco Day on March 31^st, the European Commission launched version 2.0 of their campaign For a life without Tobacco. This campaign is scheduled to run through 2009-2010 and focuses this time primarily on young persons and young adults.

An interesting aspect of this campaign is the fact that the target group was asked to help with its development

“This campaign is being fully developed with the help and advice of the target group: both individuals and youth organizations. For example, the idea for one of the new TV spots has come directly from an Internet consultation with young people.”

I didn’t know all of this when I saw the first short-movie of this campaign. I didn’t even know that it belonged to campaign urging people to think to stop smoking or not to start at all. The first time I saw it, I was that upset, that I even didn’t remember the internet-address shown at the end.

I was too busy complaining and thinking “WTF, that’s totally homophobic!”

The campaign includes three short movies, and it’s the first one I want to mention here. You can watch all three of them on the website accompanying the campaign. The site is available in 22 languages.

“As this is an EU-wide campaign, the strategy will be fine-tuned at national or even regional levels according the cultural and social needs”

The movie shows a girl, who whenever being offered a cigarette jumps on the guy next to her to kiss him.

The last scene shows her with two other girls and when being offered a cigarette by one girl she starts turning to other girl and stops.

And the off-voice says “Nice try, Anna, but for an advice that really works, visit help-eu.com”

It’s okay for a girl to kiss boys to avoid smoking, but not to kiss girls? There must be another way to follow through with the idea of this movie.

Please leave your suggestions or other “strange” advices – as requested - on their website.

The idea behind the campaign is highly innovative and I simply can’t believe that advisors let this go through. After all this is an initiation of the European Union!

As far as this short-movie is concerned, thumbs-down from eurOut.

Originally written for and published at eurout