The concept for a Marlboro cigarrette-swapping smartphone app has been making the rounds – the idea being that social smokers would be able to trade digital cigarettes for real ones using bump technology, and ‘hardcore smokers’ would be able to redeem the digital smokes for real ones once they’d accumulated enough.

It’s an interesting concept – it would make smoking ‘social’ in a way that years of negative advertising and legislation have been trying to prevent, mingling the addictiveness of nicotine and smartphone apps. It would also address the problem of social smokers who don’t want to spend money on an entire packet of cigarettes – although this is mostly Marlboro’s problem.

There’s a problem, though – the people who’d be handing cigarettes out don’t have any reason to want to get the app. Why trade cigarettes you have right now for virtual cigarettes you can redeem later? I mean, if a virtual cigarette were worth 1.2 regular cigarettes, that could work – both the bummer and the bummee would be getting something out of it. And so would Marlboro.

In other news, it’s World No Tobacco Day.

[Source: Ads Of The World]