Shocking new anti-smoking campaign in USA

The federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has launched an anti-smoking advertising campaign, which horrifically illustrates the dangers of smoking to shock people into giving up cigarettes. The name of the campaign is "Tips From Former Smokers" and all the ads are shocking through the power of the presented stories. For some of us, those ads may be hard to look at because the images are incredible and disturbing but, as many others social campaigns, is probably better that the images are shocking in order to trigger an alarm signal or to peek into a smoker future. Here you have some examples of ads:

As you can see, the idea of this campaign is to persuade trough terrible stories. This campaign has a budget of $54 million and looks like a tipical social campaign only a little bit more horrifying. In order to break through the advertising “clutter” to capture attention and create buzz, and also to attract an audience some social campaigns become more and more frightening, using scare tactics and elements of fear to sell a product or to deliver a public service message. I just wonder if it will have success or  is just a depressing campaign. Even if shows some impressive stories, I wonder if they will be really effective and not only sad..

Maria Bogus