The art of faking cancer

Drugs, drink-driving and smoking have all received shock treatment in health and safety ad campaigns.

But there are doubts over the effectiveness of graphic ads showing smiles riddled with mouth cancer and gangrenous limbs undergoing surgery.

Government health officials enlisted special effects experts to create the latest anti-smoking TV ad campaign, which shows a woman undergoing the final stages of mouth cancer treatment.

"Smoking causes mouth cancer," says the woman - an actress wearing a prosthetic mouth. "If it didn't, I wouldn't be needing radiotherapy and chemotherapy."

As the camera pans out from her diseased mouth, she says: "If looking at mouth cancer on your cigarettes makes you uncomfortable, look at another part of the pack."

The camera then zooms in on the Quitline's phone number, which is plastered on the back of a cigarette packet, along with a graphic photo of mouth cancer.

"[Shock campaigns] have [their] place but it's a process of wooing people as well as whacking them over the head," said advertising executive John Bevins.

"There's nothing wrong with whacking them over the head with something really that's going to make them come to their senses but in the total communication you've then got to woo them."

The latest anti-smoking TV ad is "so shocking that it makes it impossible to get involved with the message", said Bevin.

"It's going to work to a degree because people are going to kind of look at it and then avert their eyes. But it's not going to work to the degree that shock and horror can work when it's truly involving."

Mr Bevins has worked on anti-smoking campaigns such as the sponge-as-a-lung ad and the hook-in-the-tongue ad.

More recently his ad firm, John Bevins, created a road safety commercial featuring a young man speeding while listening to a Powderfinger song.

All of his commercials lured viewers into the ad before hitting them with a tough, and often graphic, message, he said.

Bevins said he did not realise the woman with mouth cancer in the new ad was actually an actress and suggested some viewers might feel hoodwinked when they became aware of it.

Another advertising specialist familiar with anti-tobacco campaigns, Matthew Melhuish, supported the graphic nature of the mouth cancer ad but said he was surprised an actress was used.