Dangerous Design: Advertisement or Obituary?

There is a lot of controversy about what messages advertisements provide to the public.  Designers have a strong role in advertising because they're the people that make sell the products through visual persuasion.  Although this is very helpful and useful to companies that want their product sold, it can also be an incredibly dangerous position to be in: if designers are aware of all the pros and cons of what is being sold, do they go through with designing an advertisement that would persuade the public to purchase this product?
In the case of cigarettes in the 40s and 50s, there were advertisements that promoted the use of certain brands of cigarettes.  Attractive people were used to gain the public's attention and to give them reasons to purchase their brand of cigarettes.  "If you buy my brand, you'll look just as attractive as me!"
But one of the brands, Viceroys, had dentists on their advertisements to provide "a more legitimate reason" to buy their brand.


Credit to Google Images


Granted, they were not aware at the time that smoking was one of the causes of lung cancer, so they didn't realize that they were selling what some people now call "cancer sticks."
But this is a point that shows how unintentionally dangerous design could turn out to be.  The people designing these ads weren't aware that the people they've convinced to buy these products may have ended up dying in the future from lung cancer.  This is a social responsibility that modern cigarette advertisers take into account. However, we just don't know what we have now and if it will be something of potential future consequence.  The fear that cell phones may cause brain cancer is something that we won't know until the future comes along, but for all we know, the current cell phone advertisers could be the next cigarette advertisers: promoters of future unnecessary death.


Credit to Google Images


We won't know for a while whether or not cell phones will cause early deaths, but what we do know is that advertisements are a designer's way to create something that may be important to society, but also may provide dire consequences in how people react to the product.  It's a risk that they need to take in order to survive: survival of the fittest at its finest.