Deserve to Die Update

This bus shelter poster may currently be seen at the corner of Magazine and Jackson. As local TV stations have reported, it has incensed many people who have seen it. Yet, it's already been singled out by some in the ad community as "brilliant." We disagree. If you're in advertising, you can see the payoff coming a mile away (a message from the "Lung Cancer Alliance" that hopes to change perceptions some may have that people with lung cancer deserve to die.) The problem is that most people who see this poster do not work in advertising. Thus, it seems unlikely that many of them will fervently Google to find out where "deserve to die" leads. Even when the posters are changed to display the inevitable "No One Deserves to Die" message (as we expect to happen soon), the barrier erected by the initial message strikes us as too high to surmount, and the campaign will fail. Among ad people, the buzz may be great, and "Cannes-worthy" may be murmured. But for everyone else, we suspect this campaign will go the way of "Who's Herb?"