Teens vs Tobacco: A Rhetorical Analysis on "The Real Cost" Campaign (RIA rough draft)

In America today, about 443,000 people die each year from the cause of smoking, about 50,000 more people die from secondhand smoking. This drug doesn't just cause effects on personal health, it can effect much more including animals, businesses, the environment, and the people around us.

The Real Cost is a campaign that launched in February of 2014 through a bunch of media platforms, the campaign fights against the use of tobacco by creating tons of commercials and social media posts that point out and explain all the effects that tobacco can cause. This campaign is welcomed for everyone to witness and listen to, but the main target that this campaign wants to reach out to is the teens of today. Their purpose for targeting this specific age group is to lower the percentage of teens using this drug and to continue lowering this percentage before another generation of addictive smokers begin.

This campaign has a good mixture of pathos, logos, and ethos. pathos is used in their commercials and posts, for instance, in one of their posts from Instagram they talk about how your animals can be effected and possibly die from second-hand smoke. Or in one of their commercials called "Stay In Control" it shows how a teen girls life is being consumed by this drug and how her freedom is being taken away, she also shows much depression on her face through the entire video to show that smoking isn't all fun and games and shouldn't be taken lightly. This video is also based on a teenagers life, we can tell that they are trying to target the teenagers that are watching this video, they also try to make their posts more appealing to teenagers by making ads that relate to teenagers more than they would relate to adults. Logos is also both in their commercials and posts, But ethos is more focused on their posts rather than their commercials. The commercials purpose is to bring the audience in by using pathos then hitting them with ethos when they read over their site.

The Real Cost has been working on a good amount of projects ever since it has launched, but a current one they are working on right now is to inform you about using dip, they have many videos on telling us the effects of dip and what they use to make dip, the videos show tell us facts that dip contains 4,000 chemicals in the drug and 30 of those chemicals are cancer causing. Usually the people that leave comments on their posts from the social media accounts say that they should have sources to support their claims, but if they take a farther look into their campaign source they support their claims with a lot of credible sources including the Food and Drug Administration and the National Cancer Institute. The Food and Drug Administration has an article called "Harmful and Potentially Harmful Constituents in Tobacco products and Tobacco Smoke: Established List" in this list, it confirms many of the chemicals that are in the drug that The Real Cost mentioned in their post including arsenic, cadmium, and more.

The Real Cost campaign projects have been exceeding greatly as they have mentioned in their commercials about how much they have lowered the percentage of teens smoking, but another current project they are working on is to prevent teens from smoking e-cigarettes, The Real cost states in one of their ads that "There is no safe tobacco, but what counts as tobacco?". There has always been debates about e-cigarettes that they are a safer and "ground breaking way", but is it really a safe and healthier way to quit smoking? I have found a source called Issues and Controversies and the article is "E-Cigarettes: should the federal government regulate the emerging e-cigarettes market?" this source discusses a few points including some logic. As I read over the supporters argument, they stated that "E-cigarettes and related products are potentially harmful and need to be carefully scrutinized by the federal government before they can be sold to consumers. Currently, the government regulates the e-cigarettes and for companies to make potentially false claims about their products safety." they continued to discuss their argument further including that "Advocates of regulation argue that more research must be conducted before e-cigarettes can be deemed safe. "As someone who runs a treatment program for tobacco addicts, I would love to be able to endorse the use of e-cigarettes as an alternative," Michael Steinberg of Rutgers University's Tobacco Dependence Program told the academic journal Science in January 2015. "But I cannot do that because we don't know the risks involved, nor can we be sure that moving to e-cigarettes really helps people stop smoking." they also argued that e-cigarettes could lead to people actually becoming smokers later in life, they also stated this, "Indeed, one recent study conducted by the CDC suggests that e-cigarettes might actually encourage people to smoke. Published on the website of the journal Nicotine and Tobacco Research in August 2014, the CDC study found that more than 40 percent of middle and high school students who used e-cigarettes said they intended to try tobacco cigarettes within a year." In this article it points out how e-cigarettes can actually influence teenagers to smoke, my understanding from this is that e-cigarettes are possibly a first step into climbing up the ladder on trying real tobacco and farther in life becoming an addiction.

The campaign that I will be doing relates to The Real Cost campaign because my campaign will also send a message using pathos and ethos. I will be doing a poster that is titled "Make the right choice before it's too late." The poster will have facts on the number of deaths from smoking and second hand smoke each year in America from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention site and will involve emotional appeal.

I believe that The Real Cost is a truly important campaign and should be cared about because it shows and proves many negative effects of tobacco that can change the way a person views this cultural problem and also to prevent them from making a choice to smoke. It has made itself a very trustworthy site because they provide credible information from very credible administrations like the FDA to support their facts that they give. The Real Cost shows teens how to make the right choice and to decide not to smoke so that the teens and the people around them can have a good future.