This is an anti-smoking advertisement geared towards parents of young children. The advertisement is overall plain and simple; it gets straight to the point when you look at it and utilizes a dark theme. This anti-smoking advertisement is trying to evoke a sense of “parental guilt” into parents who smoke. The way the advertisement is able to do this is through the use of an optical illusion, use of text and the use of negative space.
The first way the advertisement tries to evoke a sense of “parental guilt” into a parent is by utilizing an optical illusion. The optical illusion is created by placing a bag made out of smoke over a child’s head. The way this makes parents feel guilty is by showing them that if you smoke, you’re harming your child. When someone imagines a plastic bag over someone’s head you imagine them suffocating and they can’t breathe. Once you imagine that, you get a sense that a bag made out of smoke is just as worse as if you were to have smoke surrounded all around you, you would not be able to breathe and you would be coughing a lot. Also, once you look at the optical illusion you’re drawn to a text at the bottom that further makes parents feel guilty about smoking. The second way the advertisement tries to evoke a sense of “parental guilt” into a parent is by placing a simple text at the bottom of the advertisement. The text states that “Smoking isn’t just suicide. It’s murder”. The way this makes parents feel guilty about smoking is that it’s telling you the parent that smoking is not just bad for yourself but it’s bad for others around you. It uses a very strong word in the quote “murder”. The advertisers could have used other words like “killing” but they chose “murder”. Murder is such a strong word because it suggests that a person has already premeditated to kill someone. This is trying to tell a parent that if you’ve seen this advertisement and you don’t do anything about kicking your smoking habits