"This campaign is really meant to challenge the industry?s claims that it has changed and to markedly raise awareness on the part of Americans of the health effects of tobacco," says Cheryl Hilton, DrPH, president and chief executive officer of the foundation.

The $6 million ad campaign features full-page ads in major metropolitan newspapers in addition to two TV commercials that debuted during the Jan. 28 Super Bowl. In one of the Super Bowl ads, the voice of a former smoker speaks through an "electrolayrnx" device, reminding viewers that the tobacco industry continues to sell a deadly and addictive product ? and of the consequences of using tobacco.

In the other, Rick Stoddard speaks about how his wife, Marie, died of lung cancer at the age of 46. Family photos of the couple and their young son flash intermittently as the ad demonstrates that cigarettes take a heavy toll not only on the smoker, but on the whole family.

Hilton said the response to the ads has been emphatically favorable. "They?re fairly graphic [ads], but I?ve seen a lot more graphic things in 25 years as a health professional dealing with cancer patients," she says. "Certainly, the communications we?re getting are overwhelmingly positive."

The ads are meant to persuade young Americans not to smoke, or to quit if they have started, Hilton says. Despite industry claims to the contrary, she says tobacco companies continue to target young people.

"There clearly is a very strong effort on the part of tobacco manufacturers to encourage those in the 18-to-24 bracket to begin or step up their smoking," Hilton says. "It is our hope that this kind of prevention campaign will reach ages 12 through 24."

Alan Henderson, DrPH, a professor of health science at California State University at Long Beach, witnesses the results of tobacco marketing to young people every day.

"One of the things the industry has done is shift the focus to the 18- to 24-year-olds and, since I work in a university environment, I?m watching the smoking rate among students go up, which is astonishing to me. It?s very depressing," says Henderson, who is also former president of the American Cancer Society California Division.

Anti-smoking efforts aimed at this group of young people are hampered by the fact that it is legal for them to smoke, he says. "And the industry has figured how to promote to the 18- to 24-year olds without drawing a lot of attention to itself," Henderson says.

He points out that cigarettes are marketed in clubs that appeal almost exclusively to college-aged students when the tobacco industry sponsors events, gives away coasters and other trinkets, and distributes coupons for free cigarettes.

Hilton says such marketing schemes mean that tobacco companies have not become good corporate citizens, no matter what the companies have done recently to change their public image.

"It is hard for me to envision a product that causes half a million premature deaths a year and think of it as a positive thing," she says. "There is virtually no socially redeeming value that I can conjure up."