The Real Cost is an American advertising campaign by the US Department of Health and Human Services designed to discourage young people from smoking. They typically make Public Service Announcements that show the dire consequences of tobacco use, cigarettes, vaping, and others.
In addition to advertising, they are also the sponsors of a Survival Horror game called One Leaves, which spins tobacco use into a creepy hospital setting in which only one of the four characters can escape (a reference to the statistic that only 1 in 4 smokers is able to quit).
Tropes:
- Animate Body Parts: The characters in the "Little Lungs in a Great Big World" series are living sets of lungs.
- Body Horror: A common theme in their ads includes showing the grotesque, uncensored bodily consequences of cigarette use, many of which involve cancer, and in a few ads, dramatized representations of those consequences that are just as skin-crawling.
- Eldritch Abomination: A monster representing tobacco, usually called "The Creature", which appears in a series of ads where it attacks other people, including attempting to jump at the audience, and grows from the size of a large spider to a massive behemoth able to take out a football field.
- Facial Horror:
- "Skin" features a young girl peeling off skin from her cheek to help pay for a box of smokes, unnerving the shopkeeper.
- "Delivery" has a delivery man give a package to a smoker containing a set of dentures with yellow, rotting teeth. The dentures soon disappear, and it turns out that they are now the smoker's real mouth, as smoking severely damaged his dental health.
- Family-Unfriendly Violence: For a campaign aimed at teenagers, the ads can get pretty gross. The "Little Lungs in a Great Big World" ones in particular subject the titular character to impalement, bisection and falling from a great height, among other injuries that never seem to stick.
- Flower Mouth: The Creature in its first appearances had a mouth that opened into several "jaws" arranged to look like a flower, which also have their own mouths.
- Funny Animal: "Straw City" features a humanoid wolf who wears clothes, alongside similarly humanoid pigs.
- Jump Scare:
- One ad starring the Creature has it suddenly burst out of a box of smokes and attempt to break through the screen.
- "Don't Search It" has graphic images of diseased mouths and surgery popping up with startling sounds.
- Muck Monster: The creatures in "The 7,000" are humanoid monstrosities made of tar from smoking.
- No Name Given: Most characters appearing in the ads are unnamed, usually only known as "The Smoker", "The Shopkeep", "The Friend(s)", etc.
- Only One Name: If any character is lucky to get a name, they will only have a first name. For example, four of the five characters appearing in the "Only One Leaves" campaign are named Gabby, Will, Rashid, and Ellie.
- Scare 'Em Straight: The campaign shows horrific and gross content in order to get the anti-smoking message across.
- Smoking Is Not Cool: The lesson this campaign is meant to teach.
- Special Guest: In 2020, later Little Lungs ads featured special appearances by Tony Hawk, Terry Crews, and Sky Katz as sentient pairs of lungs inviting the title character to skate, act, and sing alongside them only to fail and suffer a gruesome death as usual.
- Tag Line:
- From "Skin" and "Teeth": "What are cigarettes costing you?"
- From the Creature ads: "If you knew what smoking really did to you, you'd run like hell."
- They Killed Kenny Again: The titular character of Little Lungs in a Great Big World always suffers a gruesome death at the end of each ad, only to return in the next as if nothing happened.
- The Tooth Hurts: One ad shows a more literal "real cost" of smoking as a customer pries his own tooth out to pay for a pack.