Tumorous cigarettes – and the rest of the year in shockvertising

What's bulbous, comically gruesome, and worth around £2.7m? The answer is not, in fact, Boris Johnson, but the government's new anti-smoking campaign, unveiled last Friday. The "hard hitting" initiative is the first graphic anti-smoking government campaign to run in the UK since images of fat-dripping cigarettes made the nation feel uneasily queasy in 2004.

After an eight-year hiatus from grimagery you'd think the Department of Health bods might now have something really quite sickening up their sleeves. So what is it? Well, explains the chief medical officer, Prof Dame Sally Davies: "People will see a man smoking and then a cancer growing out of the cigarette." Um, excuse me while I am grossly underwhelmed. If Davies really thinks a CGI tumour is shocking then I hope to God she never looks at 4chan.

In a world where you can watch execution videos on YouTube and torture-porn is a mainstream movie genre, it's getting increasingly difficult to shock people. And so, apart from a few of the usual suspects such as Peta, shock tactics have fallen somewhat out of favour as in advertising. As one New York Times critic yawned: "There's something hopelessly middle class about shock."

But, let's face it, hopelessly middle class is what Guardian contributors do best. So here's a brief rundown of the year in shockvertising.
The inevitable Photoshock fail
While cigarettes lead to mutations, sugary drinks lead to amputations. At least that's according to the logic of a recent New York health department campaign about the perils of sugary soda. Illustrated with an image of an obese amputee, the blunt messaging was that binge fizzy-drinking will leave you legless. As it transpired, however, the man in the ad hadn't lost a limb to a Dr Pepper habit that had resulted in crippling type 2 diabetes. Rather, he'd lost it to Photoshop. When this was vociferously pointed out shock fizzled into sham and the campaign lost all credibility. The moral of this sad story is that the New York health department should probably hire a better ad agency.