Watch the full ad here:

Laura's thoughts:

"Anyone that knows me, knows I’ve had a lifelong passion for horror, especially body horror. I’m a huge fan of Julia Kristeva’s philosophy of the ‘abject’ and the strange feeling of being pulled in and repulsed at the same time, as a tension to play with in advertising as much as in many of my favourite films, from Lynch and Cronenberg to The Substance (Demi, you were robbed IMHO). You are repulsed but can’t look away, and that discomfort is exactly the point.

When I arrived at Dare around 2011, a time when the indoor smoking ban was still in its first few years and cigarettes were abundant, they were creating a piece of work for the NHS that has stayed with me: Mutations - about the harm of smoking. It’s one of those rare campaigns where the immense craft has created something that feels a completely raw, unapologetic, fleshy repulsion.

The film takes the banal act of smoking and reframes it through the lens of mutation, turning in on its skin to reveal all its writhing innards. Perfect strategy, perfect creative - before any of the clever tools we have in 2025, this was the grotesque grounded in science, made for real. The growing, bubbling other that was inside us all: every puff is changing you from within.

It also marks a moment in government advertising now long past. With the closure of the COI, public campaigns have become narrower, more risk-averse and fewer. The UK no longer has one source of information for everything from public health to education and we’re worse for it. Mutations reminds us what’s possible when the state communicates with creative ambition: work that doesn’t just inform, but changes behaviour—and lingers in cultural memory. Sometimes it’s powerful enough to give you the wonderfully, tingly ick almost 15 years later, too.

The following year we launched Stoptober, a centrally-funded programme to provide a focussed month for quitting, shifting from gross-out to nudge theory and drove the momentum even more as we created a clear, long-term route out of the smog.

Through all of the NHS work around smoking at the time (remember the artery fat in the cigarette too?) we saw a rapid decrease in cigarette smoking across the country. It’s almost hard to believe now that not so long ago we were steeped in the very real and inescapable horror of cigarette addiction as a nation.

Iconic advertising doesn’t always soothe. Sometimes it horrifies. Sometimes it takes you by the throat. And sometimes—just sometimes—it saves lives by scaring you half to death."