When the Health Nazis mate with the Marketing & Advertising industry's inherent vulgarity in the cesspool of  Old Europe's moral bankruptcy, they whelp things like that:

World No Tobacco Day: Non Smoking Area. Advertising Agency: TBWA\Athens, Greece. Creative Director: Vangelis Vrouvas. Art Director: Christos Kliafas. Copywriters: George Loukoumis, Vassilis Kleisouras.

There are so many things wrong with this ad that I wouldn't know where to begin—though I suppose that hanging the "creative" director to the first lamppost would be a good start.

Having said that, I'm quite happy to be vindicated once again. In my experience, European operatives of the marketing and advertising industry always struck me as a bunch of half-educated jerks coupling Champaign Socialism with breathtaking stupidity, dreadful arrogance and terminal stages of narcissism disorder; the perfect illustration of which is provided by this sorry excuse for an advert.

Everything is wrong, both from the conceptual and technical point of view. The "visual" is totally irrelevant to the "message", as this is definitely not your average cemetary: the human beings buried under these specific crosses did not die from nicotine poisoning. The morale superiority that's alleged to drive the event advertized here is nullified by this disgraceful use of a memorial to those who fought and fell on the battlefields — in large parts liberating Europe — even more so considering the casual issue it supposedly illustrates, and the paternalizing tone and politically correct nature of those who claim to "tackle" it.

To top it all, even the production is crap. The heavy-handed Photoshop job on this thing (click for the larger version, and sneer at the blurry grass patch in the center) is obviously from the Adnan Hajj / Iranian Revolution¹ school of Unstrained Clone Tooling. Bottom line: the art doesn't save the concept, and the "art" director is not worth the "creative" one's skin.

Pathetic, but such as it is, a fine trademark of marketing and advertising.

This is on par with the latest trend of French couples shooting pornographic photos and videos in war memorials and cemetaries² — the one and only difference being that we could argue that, symptomatic as they are of the depths at which France has sunk, these slobs are just a few sick individuals who can't think of anything better to do with their sorry selves.

Not established businesses in the advertising industry, and the Holier-than-thou organizations and causes to which they lend their services.