Advertising: It's naughty to be a non-smoker

Cool people don't smoke. The anti-smoking lobby and the Central Office for Information have been struggling to make that one stand up for years. It's hard. They've tried everything. Do you remember the campaign with the beautiful girl who smelt like an ashtray? The young guy with the disgusting flat and the overflowing ashtrays? Instead of acting as a prelude to sex, they had to say it was a deal breaker, a no-way, a gross-out.

They always retired hurt. Smoking has been built into every bit of the teen experience over the last 50 years – it's really hard to dislodge it. There's a broad-based anti-smoking campaign running now, dealing directly with smoking and mortality. The man in his thirties who's clearly about to die – the teenage girl who describes her father's decline. It's memorable stuff. And precisely the kind of thing that teenagers can most easily blank.

So how can you reconstruct non-smoking as a positive for people in their early teens? How can you create sympathetic, credible non-smoker role models? Amazingly, the COI's having another go. It's got three treatments running and they're all exactly what you'd expect. They're about relating to your peer group. They're about sex and attractiveness. They've got shopping and sport, texting and tattooing. And they've got a little idea there somewhere about mischief and faking it. About the non-smoker not being the cautious nerd.

The first version has a gaggle of pretty girls looking in a tattooist's window and daring each other on. "Anna" runs with it. When she emerges with a big deep-inked biker job on her shoulder, her friends are shocked. Then she peels it off. Anna, 17, likes to shock. Doesn't smoke.

Michael, 16, is in a wheel- chair with his leg in plaster, his mate's pushing. An obvious babe magnet, a handsome risk-taker. But when the girls have gone, they're away on their skateboards. Don't smoke.

The third version has girls texting each other about the talent in a shopping mall. He's 2 shy. He's 2 clumsy. But he's hot. The one in the black tee. And they're clustered round him faster than you can say pheromone. Doesn't smoke.

Non-smokers are mischievous, uninhibited, up for it. Those naughty boys, those confident girls. There's half an idea here, but they haven't really developed it and I don't rate their chances.

Peter@sru.co.uk