by Yumiko Ono

About the author: Yumiko Ono is a staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

“Smoking Stinks,” declares a California billboard with a ponytailed teenage girl gagging as her boyfriend blows cigarette smoke into her face.

To 14-year-old Charles Eisenmann, viewing a slide of the billboard, it’s the ad that stinks. “If she doesn’t like it, she should just get away from him,” says Charles, a ninth-grader from Kansas City, Mo., and a member of the city’s Red Bridge YMCA Adventure Club, which recently convened a group of teenagers to talk about antismoking ads.

Far more effective, Charles says, is an ad featuring baseball and football star Deion Sanders, scowling, with the message: “The only things I smoke are pitchers...