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Winning the tender for this public interest campaign from the Bulgarian Healthcare Ministry was the easy bit, what with agency credentials and turnover being key selection criteria. Selling the concept to folks at the ministry wasn’t that hard either as a good number of Bulgarians in their late thirties and early forties had, at some point in their childhood, constructed the so-called ‘ciggie-pack robots’ from the empty boxes abundantly available in their homes. The client agreed the robots provided today’s first-time parents—the core campaign target—with a startling, poignant touchpoint to both their own smoke-riddled childhoods and the possible grim health prospects of their progeny. The troubles began when the Ministry was taken aback with the lurid detail of the final executions. This was was somewhat understandable, especially at a time when graphic health warnings on tobacco packaging were anything but the norm, so we toned it down a notch. The real casus belli proved to be our insistence on using actual cigarette boxes to build the robots. The uproar from the state tobacco company whose brands were used was expected and managed well in advance behind the scenes on a governmental level. It was the backlash from their competitors that broke the horse’s back: they claimed as one the whole thing was a cleverly disguised campaign for the state tobacco company. The campaign was pulled after barely a week – and the agency’s Big Tobacco client promptly put us on review.