By now you’ve seen the “Mary Quits” and “Bob Quits” advertisements plastering the city. They’re part of a massive campaign by the America’s Legacy Foundation, a group funded by the giant 1999 tobacco settlement between the states’ attorneys general and the cigerette companies to encourage people to quit smoking.

The Mary quits website features a daily video and log monitoring her attempt to quit smoking last summer, giving the prosaic task of kicking an addiction the edgy character of a reality TV show. Or that’s the intention, we think. At the least, we think the introduction video makes the Metro look a good deal more exciting than that domesticated yet generally functioning system deserves.

“Mary” is the pseudonym of a “real live 26-year-old woman who lives in the Washington area” who recently quit smoking. The campaign’s male counterpart is “Bob”, a “35-year-old native New Yorker from Queens.”

What do you make of the ads – effective, annoying, or confusing? Meanwhile, the smoking civil war between Smokefree DC and Ban the Ban seems to have cooled to a simmer, although the Smokefree DC people seem eerily peppy and omnipresent, most recently spotted handing out their trademark stickers at last week’s Barracks Row Festival.