Chilling Rankin pictures in Birmingham anti-smoking campaign

Sep 20 2009 by Alison Dayani, Sunday Mercury

THESE are the gruesome images that health chiefs hope will shock Birmingham smokers into quitting for good.

Posters of viciously beaten men, faces bloodied and bruised, go up at Villa Park, shopping centres and streets across the city from tomorrow with the tagline: ‘‘Smoking. GBH to your insides.”

NHS executives came up with the chilling mocked-up pictures after countless ‘softly, softly’ approaches failed.

Celebrity photographer Rankin, who has snapped stars including Britney Spears, Kate Moss and Kylie Minogue, has also made a sickening film of a smoker being beaten to a pulp by an invisible assailant as part of the campaign, which airs on the internet tomorrow.

Health bosses hope that by giving smokers graphic images of what harm smoking is doing inside the body, people will finally realise the fatal dangers of nicotine.

Joanna Mawtus, creative director of Dr Foster, the company that came up with the ads, said addicts were getting warning messages that ‘when you smoke, it’s your insides that get beaten up’ and ‘cigarettes attack you, but in ways you don’t always see’.

“People have been seeing stop smoking ads all their lives and everyone knows it’s bad for them, it’s old news,” said Miss Mawtus.

“Unless we give people a new perspective on it, they’re not going to take any notice.