Weight control
According to Pollay, they hired debutantes to march in Easter parades wearing these colors, which led to press photography that hit local publications in small towns. Weight control was the campaign theme of the day. Women could reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet. Through the 1920s, these campaigns built momentum.
They exploded with the advent of popular radio, cinema, and athletics. Movie stars like Gary Cooper, Frank Sinatra, Lauren Bacall, and Donna Reed appeared in tobacco ads. Even the Duchess of Windsor and Rosemary LaPlanche (1941’s Miss America) endorsed cigarette products.
Athletes like Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, and Mickey Mantle became advertising staples and sent a particularly dangerous message to fans everywhere. “If a professional athlete could smoke without concern, why should the average citizen be worried?” Pollay asks. “These are people whose livelihood depended on maintaining their health, and they were comfortable smoking.”
In the late 1940s, the advertising spread to television, and the ads grew bolder. R.J. Reynolds went so far as to craft a healthful angle to smoking with slogans like “More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.” They employed this tactic up through the early 1950s when things changed dramatically.
Link to lung cancer
In late 1953, scientific studies came to light regarding the link between smoking and lung cancer, and popular publications such as
Reader’s Digest carried the story out of the scientific community and into the homes of the general public. Leaders from all corners of the American tobacco industry quickly established countermeasures to repair the damage.
“They met in a conspiracy in December 1953 at the Plaza Hotel in New York City to create a disinformation campaign about the link between lung cancer and cigarettes,” Pollay says. “They used a variety of public relations tactics to plant seeds of doubt in the public’s mind.”
Introducing new images
Almost immediately, explicit health claims gave way to implicit advertising filled with images of strength, purity, and control. Tobacco ads pictured people engaged in robust activities in pristine environments, clearly conveying healthful notions without inviting scrutiny.
In 1964, the surgeon general released his report on smoking, which led to a variety of proposals before Congress to do something about cigarette advertising. The bill that finally passed actually turned out to be industry sponsored, requiring only an insipid warning—“May be hazardous to your health.”
Voluntary withdrawal
Several years later, cigarette advertising fell off TV altogether. Tobacco companies wanted to avoid the sting of the Federal Communications Comission’s fairness doctrine, which required that broadcasters grant equal time to anti-smoking ads.
“It’s often thought that tobacco companies were forced off of television and radio, but they actually volunteered,” Pollay says. “There wasn’t legislation to keep them off until after the fact.”
Since this shift, tobacco ads have flooded print media with some of the most sophisticated campaigns known to the world of advertising. Tacit use of color, smell, and phrasing keeps them as effective as ever. They were slick 100 years ago, and they’re slick now.
Some say history repeats itself. In this case, it’s stayed.