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LETTER: Are billboards useful or a blight on vistas? 

As I drive, I observe billboards with anti-smoking messages, anti-drug messages, political messages, religious messages and public-interest messages. Even billboards advertising restaurants and hotels are usually much more informative and helpful than the useless state signs telling you that the next exit has the inevitable McDonalds.

Your concern with keeping the state pristine seems to be misplaced.

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Antismoking ad replaced / Some say billboard promoted tobacco 

"We had a handful of people who complained about them," said Geralyn Lasher, spokeswoman for the state Department of Community Health, which sponsored the ads. . . The ad, one of five designed for the antismoking campaign that began in April, featured a youngster with a cigarette jutting jauntily from his lips.

Above him, the billboard reads: "Your little brother thinks everything you do is cool." Below him are the words: "Smoking stinks."

The ad was targeted at 9- to 14-year-olds and played very well with them when tested, Lasher said.

But some callers said the ads appeared to be promoting smoking, not attacking it.

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Missouri, Illinois Use Old Tobacco Billboards for Anti-Smoking Ads 

The latest attention-grabbers to pop up on U.S. Highway 40, Interstate 44 and other main roads in the St. Louis area show a stylishly drawn couple who have sneaked off to a corner at a party.

"Mind if I smoke?" the man asks.

"Care if I die?" the woman responds.

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ZORN: State's Anti-smoking Billboards Become The Butt Of Jokes 

"When you get your message wrong, you become a laughingstock among the audience you really need to reach," said Peter Zollo, president of Teenage Research Unlimited, a Northbrook firm that studied the effectiveness of anti-smoking campaigns in four states.

Zollo said campaigns like "Butts are gross," and "It looks just as stupid . . ." are effective only with grammar school students, who are still in the uncritical "parroting" stage when it comes to lifestyle lessons. . . That the approach is childish is not surprising given that the designs were the winners of a statewide competition among children grades 4 through 6. . . Never mind butts. Frittering away a real opportunity to attack this deadly problem--and not spending a significant chunk of the state's tobacco settlement on the fight in the coming years--now that would be gross.

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O'NEILL: Youths may miss 'Butts' message 

It's been a long time since I was a 13-year-old boy, but I'm guessing I'd be more intrigued than repulsed by a teen-ager wearing an oversized cigarette butt on his noggin, as "Butt Head" does.

Ditto for the freaky chick with the horn rims that is "Butt Ugly," and the pair of choppers clenching a cancer stick in "Butt Munch." As for the two ads supposedly dramatizing the real dangers of smoking -- a cigarette transformed into a bullet, and another combined with a syringe -- I think the operative adolescent response would be "cool!" . . Maybe this is why the tobacco companies caved, taking down all their billboards this spring. Some genius in Richmond or Winston-Salem must have realized that any mention of cigarettes, in any context, can't hurt.

We should have saved the 200 Gs and left the damned signs blank.

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Anti-smoking billboards win mixed reviews 

Davey said the billboards play on teens' desire to belong, and criticism has been limited to just one phone call and a handful of letters to the attorney general's office. . . One of the critical letters came from Joyce Lee, chairwoman of the executive committee of the Child and Family Health Consortium of Cuyahoga County. Lee said she thinks the ads' creators could have taken a lesson from cigarette makers.

``Tobacco companies don't have a negative approach,'' she said. ``They make using their product seem popular, sexy.''

She said the ads tell teens they're losers and ``teens have enough problems without calling them losers.''

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Billboards on Pa. roads ask the young to butt out 

A reporter can wait a whole career and not get to use those words in a family newspaper.

But they're up on billboards all over Pennsylvania, part of the state's antismoking campaign aimed at children from age 9 to 14.

And the butts, of course, are cigarette butts. . . Steve Neiman, the president of Neiman Group, the Harrisburg advertising agency that created the campaign, said he would not expect teenagers to stop smoking because of one billboard.

But, he said, focus groups proved to him that the advertisements, even if the words and images offended adults, would get the attention of the target audience.

"The attention-getting and intriguing way the ads get this message across should give parents and kids an opportunity to start talking to each other about smoking and other health hazards," Pennsylvania's physician general, Robert S. Muscalus, said in a statement announcing the campaign.

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Ads aim to keep youths from smoking 

Teen-agers chuckled as they biked past a sign on the Tilghman Street Bridge in Allentown. The simple ad featured yellow teeth biting down on a lighted cigarette butt and the words ''Butt Munch'' scrawled in black, graffiti-like letters. ''It's funny. It gives you that look like smoking makes your teeth all messed up, like smoking is bad,'' said Matt Schlegel, 14, of Allentown.

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Butts out, teen-agers / Pa. uses billboards to launch anti-smoking campaign 

At the union of West King and West Orange streets, a billboard shows a smoker gripping a cigarette butt in yellowed teeth next to the words "Butt munch."

Over on Manheim Pike, just west of the intersection with Fruitville Pike, another sign shows a teen-age boy who has a mushed cigarette butt for a head next to the phrase "Butt head."

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High school senior creates winning billboard design 

Eric Hancock says one classroom session was all it took to come up with a design that soon will appear on anti-smoking billboard ads in Wisconsin.

A teacher had approached him about the billboard-design contest to replace the tobacco signs that must come down . . . Along the top of a picture of a cigarette, it reads, " Smoking your life away?"

Below that, a cigarette is divided into parts that represent a person' s life, Hancock said. The last line at the butt of the cigarette is the end of life, he said.

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New Moves Into Great Outdoors 

 Billboard operators have managed to keep revenue growing by igniting interest in new categories of advertisers who, for the most part, had never before used billboards. Just 10 years ago, tobacco companies, which in April agreed to drop outdoor advertising, accounted for nearly a third of overall billboard revenue.

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ANTI-SMOKING MESSAGE Billboard / Marlboro men ride into history 

"Bob, I've got emphysema," one cowboy says to the other.

The new billboard is part of the settlement between state attorneys general, including Montana's Joe Mazurek, and major tobacco companies, said Chris Deveny, manager of the tobacco prevention and control program of the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services.

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Anti-smoking billboards replace tobacco signs 

Billboards popping up around the state closely resemble the Marlboro man and a cowboy companion. But look closer.

One of the cowboys is saying to the other: "I miss my lung, Bob."

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If Billboards Make It Here, They'll Make It Anywhere 

The anti-smoking message on a boulevard that has long been a destination for sinners and sybarites (think John Belushi; think Hugh Grant and Divine Brown) is the latest in a tradition of eye-opening billboards in Los Angeles.

The city is ground zero for drive-by messages, and the art of attracting motorists' attention with sharp humor or shock value is more lustily pursued here than anywhere else. . . Rental rates for billboards, which the industry feared would drop after the loss of tobacco clients, are rising because of new demand, said Allen Rossi, operations manager of Outdoor Systems Advertising, which owns the old Marlboro Man billboard.

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Advertising: Infinity Is Set to Acquire Outdoor Systems 

Tobacco was once the largest spender in outdoor advertising, but those ads disappeared for good last month under terms of an agreement between the cigarette makers and state attorneys general. That negative is being turned into a positive, Gottesman said, as outdoor companies cultivate other revenue sources.

"The tobacco companies were long-term clients probably paying unbelievably low rates" for their ad space, he added. "Now other advertisers can come in and pay market rates. It's like when a rent-controlled apartment turns over." [This graph only]

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