Fantastic visual argument and the Food and Drug Administration’s The Real Cost campaign

Abstract Designing campaigns to discourage youth smoking remains a difficult task. Paradoxically, data suggests that The Real Cost campaign has been a success, despite research predicting that its fantastic imagery would be dismissed by adolescent audiences. In this essay I argue that The Real Cost messages activate values-based evaluative standards that are salient for adolescent audiences in an attempt to encourage them not to smoke. In addition to explaining the persuasiveness of this campaign, my findings suggest future directions for anti-tobacco messaging while enhancing understanding of public controversies where fantastic narratives are treated as “real” while strongly-supported arguments are not. Where a disconnect between public opinion and scientific consensus exists, rhetors should tap into their audience’s transcendent values, activate emotional associations, and produce new frameworks for evaluation, rather than relying upon fact-based appeals.