15952: Promoting Gender Equality In Heart Disease…?

This Heart Research UK campaign is serious as, well, a heart attack.

14784: Note To Advertiser—Hearts Don’t Heart Red Meat.

Somebody tell Viande in Brazil that this advertising concept is not a big idea—but a bad idea.

11143: Advertisers Won’t Heart This Ad.

The agency that produced this ad—RAF Communicação in Brazil—can probably look forward to never landing a fast food, snack food, soft drink, cigarette or liquor account.

From Ads of the World.

10396: CDC Goes For The Throat And More.

From USA TODAY…

CDC says graphic anti-smoking ads work, more on way

By Wendy Koch, USA TODAY

The federal government says its graphic ad campaign showing diseased smokers has been such a success that it is planning another round next year to nudge more Americans to kick the habit.

The ads, which ran for 12 weeks in spring and early summer, aimed to get 500,000 people to try to quit and 50,000 to kick the habit long-term.

“The initial results suggest the impact will be even greater than that,” says Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which spearheaded the $54 million campaign. The ads showed real Americans talking about how smoking caused their paralysis, lung removal and amputations.

He says it’s the first time the U.S. government has paid for anti-smoking ads, although some media ran them free.

The CDC doesn’t have a tally yet on how many people actually tried to quit, but it says the ads generated 192,000 extra calls — more than double the usual volume — to its national toll-free quit line, 800-QUIT-NOW, and 417,000 new visitors to smokefree.gov, its website offering cessation tips. That’s triple the site’s previous traffic.

“We do plan to do another (campaign) next year,” Frieden says, adding that he has no details yet on the ads or their timing. He says the amount the CDC spent this year is a pittance compared with the $10 billion the tobacco industry spends annually to market its products.

The nation’s two largest tobacco companies, Philip Morris USA and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, declined to comment on the ads. Both reported solid second-quarter 2012 earnings.

Frieden says the print, broadcast and online ads struck a chord. “What we heard from people is they wished they’d seen them years ago.”

Christi Leigh Sims, 42, says she was shocked into action by the ad showing a woman whose throat cancer caused her to lose her teeth, hair and larynx, and resulted in a hole in her throat. So in late March, Sims quit — cold turkey — after about 20 years of smoking.

“I wanted to change my life now before it was too late,” says Sims, a mother of two from Arlington, Texas. “I didn’t want to look or live like that.” The ad shows a woman getting dressed with a wig and false teeth.

“We made the danger accessible and realistic,” says Eric Asche, who works for the anti-smoking group Legacy and who consulted with the CDC on the ads. “When you personalize a story, it’s powerful.”

Too powerful for some. The ads “are shocking, disgusting and too provocative — and they’ve crossed the line,” wrote stay-at-home dad Joel Mathis in a Scripps Howard News Service column. “The non-smoking majority is being subjected to an assault on our senses.”

Glenn Leshner, a University of Missouri researcher who has studied the effectiveness of anti-smoking ads in a lab setting, says they draw more attention when they feature either a health threat or disgusting images. Yet when they have both, he’s found viewers start to withdraw.

Frieden, a physician who has treated many smokers, defends the ads.

“It’s important that everyone understands the impact of smoking,” he says.

He adds that most people don’t realize that smoking causes more than lung cancer and heart disease.

Health care costs are $2,000 more each year for smokers — about 20% of U.S. adults — than for non-smokers, Frieden says, and smoking remains the leading cause of preventable deaths.

“This campaign pulled back the curtain,” he says.

7972: I Heart Mickey D’s.

From The Chicago Tribune…

TV ad blames McDonald’s for heart disease

By Dow Jones Newswires-Wall Street Journal

McDonald’s Corp. is the target of a new television commercial set to air in Washington, D.C., Thursday that blames the burger giant for heart disease.

In the commercial, produced by the nonprofit Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a woman weeps over a dead man lying in a morgue. In his hand is a hamburger. At the end, the golden arches appear over his feet, followed by the words, “I was lovin’ it,” a play on McDonald’s longtime ad slogan, “I’m lovin’ it.” A voiceover says, “High cholesterol, high blood pressure, heart attacks. Tonight, make it vegetarian.”

PCRM’s president, Neal Barnard, was once on the board of the Foundation to Support Animal Protection, now known as the PETA Foundation, which provides accounting, legal and other services to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and other animal-protection groups. A PCRM spokeswoman says the organization has no link to PETA.

“McDonald’s is committed to providing balanced menu choices and a variety of options to meet our customers’ needs and preferences,” said Cindy Goody, director of nutrition for McDonald’s.

Scott DeFife, an executive vice president at industry group the National Restaurant Association, called the ad “irresponsible” and said it “attempts to scare consumers into making choices and promotes a limited view of good nutrition.”

PCRM is airing the commercial to draw attention to heart-disease-related deaths in Washington. It says that the city has the second-highest rate of such deaths in the country, behind Mississippi, after adjusting for age, and that heart disease kills more than 1,500 Washingtonians each year. It also says the district has more McDonald’s, Burger King and KFC restaurants per square mile than eight other similar-sized cities.

The spot will be broadcast on local news stations and on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” in the Washington area. PCRM says it is also considering running it in Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami and Memphis in coming months.

Susan Levin, PCRM’s director of nutrition education, says the group is singling out McDonald’s because “they epitomize fast food and the permeation of fast food in the country.”

The group also plans to write to Washington Mayor Adrian Fenty to seek a moratorium on the construction of new fast-food restaurants in the city. In 2008, the Los Angeles City Council passed an ordinance imposing a moratorium that wound up lasting two years on the opening of new fast-food chains in a 32-square-mile area that includes some of the city’s lowest-income neighborhoods.

A city council member there is now proposing to prohibit fast-food outlets from opening within a quarter mile of each other. Community leaders in Prince George’s County, Md., near Washington, tried to ban fast-food chains from opening there this year, but the effort failed. Levin said the group hasn’t yet decided whether to ask the other potential target cities to pass fast-food moratoriums.

“It’s not that you have to be from one of the sickest geographical areas in the country to be a potential victim of what fast-food restaurants are pumping out. It’s unhealthy no matter where you live,” Levin said. “Our point in this is that, on the heels of what happened in Los Angeles, there is this recognition that something more drastic than a finger-wagging has to be done.”

PCRM has spent $7,000 on the spots airing this week. The group plans to air the commercial again later this month and in October.

– By Julie Jargon, The Wall Street Journal