The Beautifully Passive Aggressive Coughing Billboard

A Swedish billboard for a pharmacy uses outdoor smoke detectors to “sense” that a smoker is nearby, and then virtually coughs at him or her.

If the idea is to shame smokers into walking into the pharmacy to pick up products like nicotine gum, then having a virtual jerk cough at them is probably not going to work. Shame rarely does, and people who smoke have heard every version of the lecture already.

If, however, the point is to connect with the people who already think smoking is disgusting, then this billboard is a brilliantly creative way to stand out. It is worth asking which of those two audiences an idea like this is really built for, because the answer usually explains why it got approved in the first place.