Hasta La Creative!

New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene continues its gruesome efforts to fight smoking with a new set of ads featuring “Marie” from the Bronx, who has lost various fingers and possibly bits of feet (only her fingers are shown in the ads) due to poor circulation caused by smoking. Here’s one of the TV spots; the department’s Web site has a few more. The attention to detail is impressive—the ads show the actual bone saw used in Marie’s operations. “Twelve years and 20 amputations later, I ask myself, ‘Was it worth it?’ ” Marie says—a rhetorical question she doesn’t even bother to answer. (It’s unclear whether Marie, like Skip Legault from the New York state campaign, still smokes. Probably not.) The Marie ads will likely get some people to quit smoking, and other people to quit watching TV.

—Posted by Tim Nudd