Rio's Vape Ad & The Von Restorff Effect

Hi friends,

February was a month of a lot of fun, food and family.

If you read my last edition, I was in BLR airport (yeah, flight delays happen).

Travelled to my natives after a year and reunited with my cousins; there were a lot of late-night drives. Enjoyed. 

Now I’m back and let’s start…

The vaping industry built an empire on one lie.

They didn't sell tobacco. They sold fruit. Childhood tastes. Something fresh, harmless, and natural.

That's why millions of 15-year-olds picked up a vape without a second thought.

"It's just flavored air."

In September 2025, the Government of Rio de Janeiro gave Brazilian ad agency Propeg one brief: how do you fight a billion-dollar industry that's already won the perception war?

They couldn't outspend them. They had to outthink them.

Propeg's answer? 

Three OOH ads. Each one: a pair of rotting, mouldy, decomposing fruits, strawberry, mango, and pear, arranged in the exact shape of human lungs and a trachea. Stark white background. 

Just the fruit. And one headline below each.

"Strawberry-flavored emphysema." "Mango-flavored fibrosis." "Pear-flavored cancer."

Your brain does something strange when you read those.

The first half, "Strawberry-flavored", activates everything good. Your brain autocompletes it the same way it completes "strawberry-flavored gum." "Mango-flavored drink." 

Then "emphysema" arrives.

And from that moment forward, every strawberry-flavored vape is permanently associated with a rotting lung. 

But here's the copywriting technique I want you to notice. It's not the image. It's the hyphen.

"Strawberry-flavored emphysema."

The word "flavored" can easily be associated with the vaping industry. It's their marketing language. 

The same word they use to sell products, "strawberry-flavored," "mango-flavored”, is now the connector between the taste and the disease.

They didn't say "strawberry causes emphysema." That's a health warning. People skip health warnings.

They said "strawberry-flavored emphysema." That's a product description for a disease.

The formula: [Their best marketing word] + [The truth they're hiding]

This is Semantic Hijacking. You take the enemy's most powerful word. You keep it. You attach reality to it.

The campaign went globally viral in February 2026. Shared by creative directors, copywriters, and marketers worldwide. Featured on Ads of the World. Covered by Good Ads Matter, a curated 1% club of global advertising excellence.

The technique you can steal:

Find the word your competitor uses to make their product sound appealing. Keep that word. Attach the consequence they're not telling people about. Let the collision do the work.

In 1933, a German psychiatrist gave a group of people a list of words to memorize.

Most of the words were similar. Same length, type & category.

But one was different.

That word? Remembered significantly more than every other word on the list, even though participants had equal time to study all of them.

The researcher was Hedwig Von Restorff. And what she proved that day is now one of the most powerful principles in marketing.

Your brain doesn't remember what it sees most.

It remembers what it sees differently.

In a bucket of green apples, you remember the red one.

This isn't a design trick. It's evolutionary hardwiring. For thousands of years, "different" in your surroundings meant either food or danger. 

Both required immediate attention. Both required memory.

Here's what this looks like in practice.

The Financial Times prints on salmon-pink paper. Every other newspaper in the world is white. On any newsstand, anywhere, you can spot the FT from across the room.

Originally, the pink paper was just a cost decision. Cheaper ink. But accidentally, it became the most powerful Von Restorff application in publishing history. They never changed it. Pink became their fortress.

But here's the warning

The effect only works if the surroundings are homogeneous. You can only isolate one thing at a time. If you bold everything, use bright colors everywhere, and make every sentence short, nothing stands out.

Fifty spotlights in a dark room illuminate nothing differently.

One spotlight? That's all you need.

Your homework this week:

Look at your last five pieces of content, a post, an email, or a landing page. Find the one element you want people to remember most.

Now ask yourself: is everything else around it ordinary enough to let it stand out?

If not, don't add more. Remove things. Make the surroundings boring so the important thing becomes the red apple.

Talk soon,

Alen