Anti-pot ad: 'Aliens are always cool'

A new anti-marijuana advertising campaign gets high marks from Slate's "Ad Report Card" column. Indeed, the campaign is described as "very possibly the most effective, and least offensive, anti-marijuana campaign ever created." It relies on very simple sketch animation and "sweetly quirky" music. In one ad, a pot smoker is confronted by his dog. In another, a space alien swoops in and steal's a pot smoker's girlfriend.

I don't know much about advertising (except, as the t-shirt says, that it helps me decide!), but I'm having a hard time imagining how a teenager would find themselves moved to quit smoking pot by this campaign. Slate's take on it:

The lovely, doodle-y animation (by animator "Pistachios"*) helps sidestep most of the pitfalls that endanger any work aimed at teens. (The "that kid's not me, he's wearing the wrong kind of T-shirt" problem, as described by Robinson and Fogarty.) Similarly, casting an alien as the guy who sweeps the girl off her feet, while the stoner feebly looks on, eliminates the need to decide what sort of person the girl would be likely to find more appealing than a pot user. Having her new suitor be a drug-free preppie (or jock, or musician, or whatever) would be fraught with all kinds of peril. Not so with an alien—because aliens are always cool.

Oh. I guess that explains it. Anyway, it's definitely worth heading over to the column and viewing the two embedded ads they're highlighting from this campaign; it's always nice to see what the ONDCP is up to...