Irritating the tobacco lobby. But only a little.

If this ad had been produced for Australian Television, the kid buying the cigarettes would have walked away with blood spurting out of his mouth and his jaw swelling to the size of a watermelon.  He would have screamed his head off as he pulled his tooth with the pliers, by the way.  Because Reality.

Ah, but this is American television, where anti-smoking ads can't feature anything resembling reality.  Instead we get CGI monsters crawling into cigarette packs.  Just like the anti-texting while driving ads are more comical than scary- because getting run over by a car is actually more of an inconvenience than anything else.  And don't even get me started on the ads which calmly, quietly and sweetly encourage us to maybe kind of think about not drinking to excess before getting behind the wheel.  Sure, the message is important- but the tobacco, phone and alcohol lobbies are enormous, musn't ever tick them off too much.

From this ad, we get the idea that if you smoke enough cigarettes, it might cost you one of your teeth.  I can see a lot of smokers thinking "hey, I remember being told that smoking covered my lungs with thick tar and lead to all kinds of nasty diseases and birth defects and early death.  Losing a tooth?  I can totally deal with that."  Sometimes I don't know why we even bother, if this is the level of edgy we are willing to go for.