"This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?" For anyone who watched TV in the late 1980s, that phrase should bring back memories of an egg in a frying pan. As a child, that anti-drug commercial was, if not powerful, at least memorable. I didn't really understand how my brain would ever be anything remotely like a fried egg, but I certainly got the message that drugs weren't good for me.
Nowadays, anti-tobacco ads are filled with cartoon characters and sing-a-longs, part of the tongue-in-cheek efforts of the Sunny Side of truth ad campaign. Recently, I was watching one of these TV ads and found myself humming along to "The Magical Amount" song, which satirically suggests that tobacco companies have manipulated the level of nicotine in cigarettes to the extent that you'll be addicted but not have any adverse health effects. Was I thinking about this as I hummed? No, to be honest, I had little awareness of the actual point of the commercial. After seeing it several times, I was surprised that an anti-tobacco commercial would try to convey its message through songs whose lyrics communicate the opposite message. As a memory researcher, I question whether the actual message will be as memorable as the campaign hopes.
What inspired this new approach? What happened to traditional negative campaigns, where you bash your opponent in the clearest possible terms? Sure, we're all rightfully annoyed by negative political campaigns, particularly when the truth behind many of the attacks is dubious. Yet, research has shown that negative ads do work. One of the reasons for this may be because people tend to believe that repeated statements are true, regardless of their actual truth, a phenomenon known as illusory truth effects. If you tell me enough times that Product A is less desirable in some way than Product B, I'll start to believe it. Through repetition, this statement becomes so familiar that I eventually remember the claim but forget that the source of it (Company B) may not be credible. Even posing a question, such as ‘Did Senator X lie about Y?', can later be remembered as ‘Senator X lied about Y.' Although unethical people could exploit this memory phenomenon through the repetition of false statements about their competitors, certainly anti-smoking or anti-drug campaigns, in which the claims against the enemy are backed by scientific evidence, should take advantage of the fact that repetition breeds familiarity.
The problem is that a negative ad that is confusing, or whose target is ambiguous, may be worse than no ad at all. I've seen some car commercials that attempted to point out the shortcomings of their competitor but were so poorly done that at the end of them I couldn't remember which of the two cars they were trying to sell. I'm concerned that the Sunny Side of truth ads may turn out to be ineffective for this exact reason. The worst-case scenario is that kids go away from them remembering that there is a magical amount of nicotine in cigarettes. More likely, the context of the message will be forgotten and they'll just be left with an irritating song in their heads. As much as I appreciate the novel approach that these commercials take, the satire behind cartoons and songs may not be nearly as transparent as the image of drugs turning your brain into a fried egg.
