Chanting lighters: Indian anti-smoking campaign
(CBS) - The only thing more stubborn than a smoker are the endless variations of anti-smoking campaigns. India's Cancer Patients Aid Association tried a new campaign that focused not on the cigarettes or the smokers, but on the lighters. By rigging public lighters with an Indian "death chant," CPAA hoped to remind smokers about the very real consequences of nicotine addiction.
In India, 'Raam Naam Satya Hai' is chanted when a dead body is carried to the funeral pyre. This chant is synonymous with death. So we tried to leverage this well-known local idiom for an anti-smoking message. Result was a chanting lighter. Fitted at cigarette shops in place of the regular lighters, this chanting lighter played the death chant, every time someone tried to light a cigarette.
As a result, most smokers were totally shocked by the bluntness of the message that they decided not to light their cigarettes there. Some of them, out of a sense of realization and horror, even threw the cigarettes away.