Go ahead, light up a cigarette. Why? Because a bunch of just-say-no health cops as old as your parents don't want you to!
In a notable shift of marketing strategy, the No. 2 U.S. tobacco company has launched new advertisements for its much-vilified cigarettes that challenge anti-smoking activists as killjoys and prudes who deserve defiance and ridicule.
The new approach to selling cigarettes could complicate the task of public health officials in trying to persuade young people not to smoke. The latest ads seek to enhance smoking's image as a forbidden fruit, and could make heavy-handed anti-smoking propaganda rebound to the tobacco industry's advantage, some public health experts say.
A new advertising campaign for Camel and a successful, year-old campaign for Winston -- both brands of No. 2 manufacturer R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. -- have taken the gloves off in attacking what the ads suggest are puritanical, prohibitionist attitudes of tobacco foes.
The new Camel advertisements feature mock warnings headlined "Viewer Discretion Advised," which appear along with the legally required health warning. "At least you can still smoke in your own car," declares one billboardfor Winston's so-called "No Bull" campaign. "Judge me all you want, just keep the verdict to yourself," says another.
A colorful Camel ad introduced in national magazines last month shows a shotgun-wielding farmer chasing from his house a young man whom he clearly has just caught in bed with his beautiful daughter. The shapely, blond daughter, draped in a bedsheet, is smoking a cigarette; her attitude is titillatingly described as: "Satisfied smoking."
The furious farmer, a comic figure in his floppy-eared hat, might be interpreted as standing for the anti-smoking forces.
"That's me," Robert L. Kline, director of the Tobacco Control Legal Clinic at the Northeastern University School of Law, says ruefully. "They're poking fun, which is an effective advertising technique."
Disturbing presentation
Public health advocates seem particularly disturbed by Camel's pseudo-warnings, which not only echo the health warning but resemble the ratings that rank movies and television shows as inappropriate for children.
"Implicitly, this mocks the campaign to keep children from smoking," Dr. John Slade, a veteran anti-tobacco activist at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical Center in New Jersey, says of Camel's new campaign. "The industry is in effect toying with us."
Not so, says Fran Creighton, Reynolds' marketing vice president for Camel. "We would never make fun of the cigarette health warning," she says. "This is maybe more about the PC [politically correct] world we live in. The world has an authoritarian view on everything."
Angry accusations from anti-smoking forces about the ads' nefarious purposes, however, may be just the reaction Reynolds marketers are hoping for. Other new Camel ads indirectly ridicule the anti-tobacco activists' earlier attacks on Reynolds' "Joe Camel" campaign, which Reynolds dropped last year after a decade of complaints that the cartoon camel appealed to children and contained sexual imagery.
"Viewer Discretion Advised: Subliminal Imagery," says one ad. "May Contain Pop Mythology," says another, and the symbol on the cigarette pack is labeled: "Camel's head on pack rendered from 'classified' photo of alien."
The ads' use of humor is tough for opponents of smoking to counter.
"It's a lot easier to sell rebellion than to sell nonrebellion," says Bill Novelli, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. "They'll always score with something that has fatalism, edge, gallows humor."
With no national tobacco settlement to restrict cigarette advertising, and money from lawsuit settlements and government health budgets flowing into anti-smoking campaigns, some foresee a battle of slogans for the hearts and minds of young people. "It's not that different from two political campaigns slugging it out," says Dr. Michele H. Bloch, a Rockville physician who heads the tobacco prevention subcommittee of the American Medical Women's Association.
Reynolds denies intent
Reynolds executives deny that they specifically seek to undercut anti-smoking activists. But Ned Leary, the Reynolds vice president in charge of the Winston brand, admits his ads attack proposals to curb teen smoking by heavily taxing cigarettes. One Winston slogan asks: "Why do politicians smoke cigars while taxing cigarettes?"
"Winston with its 'No Bull' positioning is rejecting bull wherever it's found," and that includes cigarette taxes, Leary says. "If the question is, are we trying to debunk the serious health risks associated with smoking, the answer is absolutely not."
Reynolds' anti-anti-smoking slogans follow a change of strategy last year by top tobacco executives, who for the first time publicly acknowledged that smoking causes deadly illness. While just a few years ago, industry spokesmen would admit only a "statistical association" between smoking and disease, Leary declared: "It's been known for decades that smoking cigarettes is dangerous."
The shift of stance liberates marketers, who now can use the danger of smoking in their pitches. One new Winston ad associates cigarettes with fried food, another target of health advocates. Novelli characterizes the implicit message of the new Camel ads as: "Light up, we're all going to die anyway."
Winston and Camel, the second and fourth most popular nondiscount cigarettes, together hold less than 12 percent of the market. As they scramble for market share with splashy new ads, Philip Morris' Marlboro brand continues to dominate, with 33 percent.
Its strong position evidently secure, Marlboro continues to rely on the Marlboro Man campaign first introduced in the mid-1950s, with myriad variations on a familiar theme of cowboys and mountains.
But there have been subtle changes, says Gary D. Black, a leading tobacco industry analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein in New York. "The cowboy's gotten younger, from his 40s to his 20s. He's got people near him -- he's got friends. They've freshened his look," Black says.
Marlboro has run an insert recently in national magazines that shouts in big red letters, "Party All Night. Play All Day," inviting "smokers 21 and over" to enter a sweepstakes to win a five-day visit to a "Marlboro ranch" in Arizona or Montana.
Reynolds spokesmen, wary of the accusations of targeting children that dogged the company for years, use the phrase "adult smoker" in almost every sentence. They point out that the new Camel ads have run in such magazines as Vanity Fair, GQ, Esquire and Car & Driver, by no means children's publications. The edgiest of the Winston ads have run in alternative weeklies, such as Baltimore's City Paper, whose readers are youthful but mostly over 18.
Anti-tobacco advocates reply that more than 80 percent of adult smokers started before age 18, and that younger teens naturally imitate their 20-something elders.
"You don't have to target a 16-year-old to hit a 16-year-old. It's like carpet bombing," Novelli says.
'Who you callin' tasty?
Moreover, the anti-smoking advocates point out, some of the new ads use sophomoric vulgarity unlikely to appeal to mature adults. One Camel billboard shows two meaty wrestlers in a clench, with the tag line: "Who you callin' tasty?" A Winston ad that has run in alternative newspapers, pushing the brand's claim to be "100 percent tobacco," shows a man in a business suit bent over, his head disappearing up his posterior. "Still smoking additives?" the tag line asks.
U.S. cigarette advertising is widely considered one of the marketing triumphs of the 20th century, in which the association of brand with image has proved a powerful sales device.
Whenever health concerns have threatened cigarette sales, marketers have devised new ways to meet them. In the 1940s, Reynolds ads claimed, "More Doctors Smoke Camels Than Any Other Cigarette!" Later, various brands used filters or "low tar" ratings to imply that certain cigarettes were healthier, claims health experts say were never substantiated.
Adult smoking nonetheless has gradually declined in recent decades. But youth smoking, after declining for years, has turned around in the 1990s and begun to climb; the smoking rate of college freshmen last fall reached the highest level recorded since 1967.
The numbers, and the aggressive new advertising, create a growing challenge for public health authorities.
"I think the problem of designing a program to keep kids from smoking is going to be huge," says Jerie Jordan, who manages a federally funded anti-smoking program for the American Cancer Society. "If you're not careful, it can backfire."
Slade, the New Jersey anti-smoking expert, says the cigarette makers' marketing creativity should never be underestimated.
"They're good at what they do," he says. "You just have to look at their continuing success in selling a product that kills, in the face of incredible adversity."
Pub Date: 7/11/98