Now its cannabis and gay incest

Here's one we haven't seen before. Throughout the long history of reefer madness this one has to be the weirdest yet. A new short for MTV Canada, reported in the Toronto star attempts to dissuade young people from driving stoned. Itself a perfectly laudable goal, but the new ad's approach is to present an every day cautionary tale suggesting that your judgment after smoking a bong will be so compromised you will engage in a homoerotic kiss with your same sex sibling. And if you're so wasted you're snogging your brother, well obviously you really shouldn't be driving.

watch it here

You'd be forgiven for asking what the hell this is about. I feel fairly certain that a search of Pubmed will show no papers linking cannabis and gay incest. No - this is a classic attempt at the modern art of viral Internet marketing. In terms of exposure, it clearly works - I'm blogging it, your reading about it and probably watching it, some of you will tell others about it, and on it goes. The film makers, none other than uber-agency Satchi and Satchi, are not a stupid bunch. They've thought this through; they know you can massively magnify an ad's exposure by including enough controversy or shock value to ensure the ad itself becomes the story. So far, so cynical.

But, you have to ask - will the ad, either in its original TV slot or in its Internet afterlife, achieve anything more than lots of viral exposure. The so-clever-it-hurts Satchi execs clearly know all about exposure, but do they know how to reduce the level of driving under the influence? Do they measure outcomes? Do they care? Anti-drink driving campaigns have been highly effective in the past, so its not as if the film makers had nothing to base this pathetic effort on.

The obvious problem with the film is that it's completely ridiculous, and fails so spectacularly to chime with reality or the experiences of its target audience that the possibility then exists of its safe driving message actually being undermined. 'Kids' don't like being patronised, and we have long and rather tragic history of failed anti-drug campaigns devised by 'grown-ups' to prove it.