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ZORN: State's Anti-smoking Billboards Become The Butt Of Jokes 

"When you get your message wrong, you become a laughingstock among the audience you really need to reach," said Peter Zollo, president of Teenage Research Unlimited, a Northbrook firm that studied the effectiveness of anti-smoking campaigns in four states.

Zollo said campaigns like "Butts are gross," and "It looks just as stupid . . ." are effective only with grammar school students, who are still in the uncritical "parroting" stage when it comes to lifestyle lessons. . . That the approach is childish is not surprising given that the designs were the winners of a statewide competition among children grades 4 through 6. . . Never mind butts. Frittering away a real opportunity to attack this deadly problem--and not spending a significant chunk of the state's tobacco settlement on the fight in the coming years--now that would be gross.

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