Body Bags

Why it works

Outside a major tobacco company's headquarters in New York, a group of young people unload body bags onto the street and pile them up, 1,200 of them, one for each person tobacco kills every day, while their leader addresses the executives inside through a megaphone. "Body Bags" was one of the first spots for truth, the national youth anti-smoking campaign launched in 2000 with money from the tobacco industry's Master Settlement Agreement with the states. It is studied for turning anti-smoking advertising inside out: rather than tell teenagers not to smoke, it confronted the industry with stark facts and exposed its marketing, casting the tobacco companies, not the smoker, as the villain. A peer-reviewed study in the American Journal of Public Health estimated that the campaign accounted for about 22% of the fall in youth smoking between 1999 and 2002, roughly 300,000 fewer young smokers. In 2015 Ad Age ranked truth No. 10 among the top 15 ad campaigns of the 21st century.