TBWA\Singapore & The Health Promotion Board break Gen Z’s wall of resistance to curb the vaping trend

Vaping is an insidious trend among young people worldwide. Its sweet flavours and nicotene-high mask serious dangers.

The group of people most vulnerable to the vaping trend is resistant to being told what to do by authority figures. Traditional health advertising is unlikely to succeed. But TBWA\Singapore found a way to get through the wall.

The campaign began with mysterious silhouettes appearing throughout Singapore’s MRT network before it evolved into a visually spectacular anti-vape campaign. Don’t Toy With Your Life doesn’t talk down to young people. Its unexpected approach – a young, fun and wildly creative – invites them to look behind the seemingly attractive façade and harmless façade of vaping and recognise its real, harmful impact.

The campaign grabs attention with its grotesque figurines designed with a dose of dark humour – Popcorn Lungs, Addicted Brain, and Diseased Heart. Attraction and repulsion combine to draw viewers’ attention and then reveal unsettling truths about the health harms that vaping will bring to its user.

Loo Yong Ping, executive creative director of TBWA\Singapore, stated, “We intentionally mirror the appealing aesthetics often used to attract potential users, only to reveal the serious health risks and legal consequences of vaping. By doing so, the campaign highlights the deceptive allure of vaping and urges the public to reject it.

“Recognising our youths’ strong interest and current craze in limited-edition collectibles, we chose striking blister toy packs as our visual hook to capture their attention and spark a connection. We used design not just as decoration, but as a cultural trojan horse — embedding a serious message into a format that felt familiar and native to youth culture. By reimagining anti-vape communication through the lens of collectible packaging, we transformed pop-culture visuals into a visually arresting warning to initiate important conversations on the serious consequences of vaping.”

The campaign’s hero commercial then critiques the perils of social and media influence on youths through a fictional live streamer, whose use of deceptive sales tactics to sell figurines mirrors precisely the manipulative ways harmful trends, such as vaping, can be propagated and glamourised online to a young audience. At the same time, it also demonstrates how one be easily influenced by peer pressure due to the desire to fit in.