There were a handful of times last night when the packed living room where I watched the Super Bowl seemed to fall silent with concentration. One came when the New England Patriots' Adam Vinatieri lined up to attempt his game-winning field goal with seven seconds left. Another came during one of several advertisements sponsored by the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
Built around the (true) premise that terrorist groups and states that harbor them, such as Afghanistan, have been known to traffic in drugs, the ads accused American drug users of financially supporting terrorism.
Full disclosure: I'm a football fan, not an ad critic. But on a Super Bowl night when, for once, the football was first-rate and the advertising was mostly forgettable, the anti-drug spots were a glaring exception to the trend. They were, in short, impossible not to notice.
For those who design anti-drug ads, anti-smoking ads, anti-alcohol ads -- anti-anything ads -- the general strategy has long been to produce something that will cut through the haze of banal admonitions and scare the hell out of impressionable viewers. Last night's anti-smoking commercials sponsored by the group "truth" were a textbook example of this tactic: Cigarettes contain the same ingredients as rat poison, one warned.
The new anti-drug ads, however, took a completely different tack, playing not on drug users' fears for their personal safety, but rather on their sense of social conscience -- indeed, their patriotism. Buying drugs, the ads implicitly argued, could make another terrorist attack possible. It could let America's enemies win.
In one sense, such an approach betrays a profound idealism. Whereas the conventional anti-drug, anti-smoking, anti-alcohol strategy seeks to exploit Americans' concern for themselves, the new ads seek to exploit our nascent concern for country. The assumption that such a tactic might be effective says a good deal about the degree to which patriotism and shared destiny have triumphed in the wake of tragedy. We are all communitarians now.
Whether or not the ads will actually work is another matter. But you have to admit the reasoning behind them is clever. For one thing, they're clearly aimed at young, marginal drug users -- not long-time addicts.
Let's say their target audience is made up of seventeen year-olds who may or may not decide to use drugs recreationally on any given weekend. Seventeen year-olds often feel invincible, which is why they're more inclined to engage in high-risk behaviors like driving recklessly or having unprotected sex. When it comes to such a demographic, fear-mongering ads aren't likely to register. Yet even a fearless seventeen year-old may have a social conscience; and even those lacking much political awareness were likely affected emotionally by September 11. So where scare tactics have failed to reach young people in the past, why not play on their new spirit of patriotism?
But while the idea behind the Office of National Drug Control Policy ads may be idealistic, provocative, even clever, it's not entirely original. In fact the concept recalls a controversial anti-smoking campaign from the early 1990s that explicitly targeted blacks. The ad campaign included posters featuring a cowboy skeleton lighting a black child's cigarette under the slogan, "They used to make us pick it, now they want us to smoke it."
That campaign was more narrowly aimed than last night's Super Bowl ads. But both ask viewers to forget the self-destructive personal impact of smoking and drugs, and focus on how the "evildoers" -- those who enslaved your ancestors or those who are at war with your country -- benefit from your habit.
Invoking historic tragedies to unrelated ends runs the risk of cheapening the memory of these events by over-extending their lessons. But as long as post-September 11 patriotism is being used to sell everything from cars to beer, it's hard to argue with using it to sell a worthwhile message about drugs. That the ads were jarring enough to make football fans -- watching one of the better Super Bowls ever played -- think briefly about something other than football is not a bad initial measure of success.