HOLY SMOKE! How scary is it when advertising works?

The other week a man blew his mouth out sucking back on a kretek cigarette while riding his motorbike along a Jakarta highway. Apparently there were explosives in the cigarette he was smoking, although the cigarette company seemed insufficiently intrigued by the event to investigate. Instead, the man was given compensation equivalent to $86 per tooth lost.

This horrifying story made me want to do two things, in this order:

1. Post the story to my Facebook profile as a warning and deterrent to my friends who smoke.

2. Go out and buy a packet of cigarettes, take them to the roof of my 30 floor apartment building, and look out over Jakarta whilst smoking - secretly, slowly and deliberately.

I have no idea what this says about me. Something odd I imagine.

(I should note at this point that I am a non-smoker and I haven't smoked a cigarette since I was about 16).

As it happened, I didn’t do either of those things. (Belum). But writing this post is the equivalent of posting it to my Facebook profile as a warning to my friends. And as for the 2nd point... well....

Living in Indonesia makes me want to smoke. Like, more so than when it was daring and super cool - when I was 14 in a damp alley behind Angel Place with the cool girls from school.

I am, of course, one of those people on whom advertising completely and utterly works.

Imagine for a moment you are an alien and you come to Indonesia for just one day to learn about Indonesians. For this task, however, you are only allowed to observe the advertising Indonesians consume. At the end of your day in this country, wherever you happened to land on this lovely archipelago, you would board your spaceship and shoot off through the atmosphere to find your friends and tell them that in Indonesia:

1. Everyone has Sunsilk shiny hair,

2. Everyone has skin that wants to be white

3. Everyone owns very fancy communications devices and maintains constant contact with everyone they have ever met.

4. Oh, and they all smoke magical things that make them incredibly cool and talented.

I was recently on a boat in the middle of the jungle, sitting around with some awesome girls who are all cool in a way that you can’t conceive of being at the age of 14. One of them – who is already cool because she knows the names of DJs in an entirely unpretenscious way – lit up a cigarette and flicked her head back, pouted her lips and sent a stream of smoke out over the river. I was transfixed. I wanted so badly to be her. And not even in a ‘smoking is cool’ kind of way. But rather a ‘smoking seems like the natural thing to do right now’ kind of way. Because in Indonesia, smoking is the natural thing to do all the time. Advertising reassures you at every turn. Just next to you in your traffic jam, there is a series of flags on which a particularly talented and gorgeous man with lovely biceps does the following things:

1. Hangs off the side of a cliff showing off his enak (delicious) calf muscles.

2. Canoes down river rapids looking determined and robust and showing off his forearms (also quite enak).

3. Other things that I can't specifically remember but I do remember they involve chiselled muscles and the sort of physical activity that you can't do with a cigarette in your hand (and you probably won't have the lung capacity to do if you're much of a smoker).  

I’m convinced this kind of messaging takes some time to sink in to the point where it changes the way you think and in turn the way you behave; as it has taken almost a year for cigarette advertising to have this effect on me. Up until recently, I barely noticed the ads except to scoff at how ridiculous they were. Then it all changed in a frighteningly subliminal way. I noticed it most markedly a few weeks ago, around the time of the exploding cigarette.

On my walk home from work, I cross a massive bridge over a wide lumbering sewer stretching to the horizon. Every day, slowly, the light of the day recoils and gets caught in the pollution hanging in the air, throwing firecrackers of red and purple and yellow and hot pink across the debris-filled water. Sometimes I stop and watch. There is a giant billboard just over the other side of the bridge, which very recently changed its advertisement. I have no idea what it was before, but now it is the most effective piece of advertising I have seen in some time (certainly for me). It’s a stylised image of a skateboard ramp that seems to have been drawn with one of those sparklers you played with on fireworks night when you were a kid – drawing swooping arcs of fiery light in the air, racing against the disappearing light to finish writing your name before the beginning of it burned out. In the ad, there are two skaters at either end of the sparkly ramp, and the one on the right is actually shooting clear of the billboard itself – so he’s suspended in the Jakarta skyline, perched next to the logo of the Four Seasons Hotel. In the middle of the ramp, the advertising slogan glows incandescent like the end of a sucked-on cigarette - and invites you to "Go Ahead."  It's a directive - nudging you along like the 15-year-old cool kid behind the shelter sheds, offering you a light. Go ahead! It encourages your instincts to follow everyone around you - to join the legions of supporters whose fingers lace around flaring sticks everywhere you look. Go ahead!

At sunset, the windows of apartments and office buildings surrounding the billboard come to life (hidupkan) with the reflected colours of the disappearing sunlight, which bounces off the skate-ramp. Suddenly the space between the sewer and the sky gleams with dazzling possibility. The ad placement is so perfect and alluringly aspirational I want to cheer and boo at the same time.... whilst blowing smoke-rings out over the disgusting rubbish-filled waterway gurgling below the bridge under my feet. It is only in writing this that I realise there is no cigarette represented anywhere on the billboard, yet somehow I know the ad is for cigarettes and I want one. Now.

(Obviously, I am deliberately not addressing the issue of cigarette advertising from a health perspective, or a – oh that’s so shocking, how dare they still advertise like that - kind of way. Rather, I’m interested in it from a bloody hell, cigarette advertising actually seems to work perspective. And just how scary that concept is).

So this little note is just a heads up that it won’t happen overnight, but it will happen. Advertising works.

Holy smoke!

***

By the way, if you don’t believe me about the exploding cigarette, check this out: http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/home/exploding-cigarette-earns-hurt-indonesian-rp-5-million/356201

Also: if you're interested in the subjects of cigarette advertising in Indonesia, have a look at this: http://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/8/1/85.extract. You need to sign in to read the full text, but you can register for a free trial.

 

oh, and I'll take a photo of the ad soon and post it.