Advertising

From humble beginnings in the 1700s, advertising has become the tobacco industry's primary mechanism for the promotion of tobacco use to each new generation of smokers. Whereas in 1900 tobacco advertising targeted mainly white Western men, by the year 2000 tobacco was promoted to women, men, and even children, in markets across the globe. Although the influence of tobacco advertising is hotly debated, control of advertising is now at the heart of initiatives to reduce tobacco consumption.

Early Tobacco Promotions

Tobacco manufacturers have, at least from the eighteenth century, used strategies to promote their wares. Trade cards, which were used in tobacco distribution in North America from the seventeenth century, and also tobacco wrappers, featured a range of images including those of American Indians, tobacco leaves, snuff boxes, and other tobacco accessories. Promotion efforts were taken a stage further with the introduction of branding, which was one of the earliest forms of advertising.

Branding allowed a manufacturer to sell a range of products but this was dependent on the ability to standardize production: "The Brand acted as a source of information for the nature of the product determined by either advertising, a previous sale, or the connotations provoked by the brand name itself or its image" (Hilton 2000). By the 1850s, tobacco products in the United States and Britain were increasingly given brand names and, through these, specific identities. Cherry Ripe and Wedding Cake were brands of chewing tobacco available in the United States, while in Britain Bishops Blaze and Best Bird's Eye competed for the pipe smoker's attention. Symbols also emerged as branding devices. The image of a bull was used effectively on the wrappings and advertisements for the Bull Durham brand of smoking tobacco manufactured by a North Carolina firm in the 1860s.

Advertising of tobacco products took off toward the end of the nineteenth century in the United States, and afterward in Britain. In the United States, Buck Duke organized his own polo team named after one of his leading cigarette brands, Cross Cut. In Britain, one tobacco company published a magazine, Cope's Tobacco Plant (1870–1879), to promote smoking in general and its products in particular. Sponsorship of events was utilized effectively to promote Bull Durham's smoking mixture in 1877. Advertisements appeared on billboards, and colorful posters that reproduced the images on cigar labels and cigarette advertisements were available from suppliers in the United States and Britain.

Packaging was a particularly important aspect of advertising. For example, from the 1860s to the early 1900s North American cigar boxes were decorated with attractive and technically sophisticated labels that could take up to a month to create. Images of "exotic" women were a common feature of these labels. Cigarette cards , which were used initially to strengthen soft paper cigarette packets, were also well established in the tobacco industry's advertising repertoire by the 1890s. Seductive images of beautiful, and often scantily clad, women were used on cigarette cards on both sides of the Atlantic, although there were also more conservative themes such as the Kings and Queens of England and famous sports personalities. These cards were desirable in themselves and highly collectible.

Twentieth-Century Advertising

The prominence of advertising at the turn of the twentieth century was precipitated by a need for new markets for tobacco products and, in particular, mass-produced cigarettes. Mass demand was required to realize the profit potential of new cigarette manufacturing techniques, in particular the introduction of the Bonsack machine. The "tobacco war" between the American and British tobacco industries in 1901 and 1902 added impetus to cigarette advertising, as did advertising wars inside the United States from 1913. Advertising became a major area of expenditure by tobacco manufacturers in the twentieth century, and the biggest area since 1945.

Image was central to tobacco, and especially cigarette, advertising. Although there are clear taste differences between Turkish, Virginian, and mentholated brands, in other respects cigarettes are "fundamentally homogenous products" (Chapman 1986). To enhance the effectiveness of advertising, the tobacco industry enlisted the help of public relations experts, psychologists, and psychoanalysts. In interwar United States, Washington Hill, the president of American Tobacco, worked with public relations expert Edward Bernays to promote Lucky Strike cigarettes. John B. Watson, one of the founders of behavioral psychology, worked closely with the tobacco industry, and Walter Dill Scott's Psychology of Advertising (1902 and 1921) was one of the guiding texts of the industry.

The media emerged as a principal means of direct and indirect cigarette advertising in the twentieth century and the tobacco industry was quick to exploit new types of media: newspapers, periodicals, film, and television. However, in Australia traditional forms of advertising such as counter displays and shop signs continued to dominate the sale of tobacco for pipes and roll-your-own cigarettes until 1950.

National advertising campaigns became common in the West following the expansion of the popular press. The North American Bull Durham brand was promoted in the 1880s using local newspapers and large dailies. Extensive newspaper advertising appeared during World War I when the U.S. tobacco industry initiated campaigns to provide cigarettes for soldiers. The American Tobacco Company struck a deal with one newspaper for a daily front-page display box along with three or four column articles or displays at the top of an inside page. In Britain, too, newspaper advertising grew in importance from the late nineteenth century, and, by the interwar period, 80 percent of advertising expenditure was spent on the press.

Women's magazines have been an important source of cigarette advertising in the West since the 1930s. Although when television and radio advertising became available in Britain and the United States in the 1950s, magazine advertising slumped; later, when bans were imposed on tobacco advertising in television and radio, cigarette advertisements re-emerged in women's magazines. In the 1970s and 1980s most major U.S. women's magazines took cigarette advertisements and in 1979 cigarettes were the most advertised product in some U.S. magazines. In Britain, a survey of fifty-three magazines aimed at fifteen- to twenty-four-year-old women in 1985 revealed that two-thirds featured cigarette advertising.

The potential of film to promote smoking, especially of cigarettes, was also realized by the tobacco industry. Film stars endorsed De Reszke cigarettes in a string of advertisements in Britain's Vogue magazine in 1919; by the 1930s this was common practice on both sides of the Atlantic. Although smoking appeared in silent films, and was common from the 1930s, there is little explicit evidence of tobacco industry interventions. In the 1980s, however, the tobacco manufacturer Phillip Morris admitted to paying Sylvester Stallone to smoke Kool cigarettes in the action movies Rhinestone (1984) and Rambo: First Blood, Part 2 (1985). Unofficial sources also indicate that films have been used deliberately to advertise cigarettes through product placement. Marlboro vans, for example, appeared in the background of Superman II (1980). An increased occurrence of smoking and of major cigarette brand names has been noted in films released between 1990 and 1996.

The availability of television after 1950 provided important new channels for advertising a range of tobacco products in the West. In the United States in 1968 the largest tobacco company, R.J. Reynolds, concentrated 80 percent of its advertising budget on television promotions, until a ban in 1971. In Britain, too, bans on television and radio advertising closed off these channels as direct forms of advertising. Direct advertising was not, however, the only form of tobacco promotion on television. Indirect advertising also occurred, particularly when the tobacco industry sponsored major sporting or cultural events. This strategy was commonly used to circumvent restrictions on television and radio advertising. During two state football finals in Australia in 1982, tobacco hoardings were on screen 1,412 times each for an average of 3.7 seconds. This amounted to 26.6 percent of total program time.

In the context of increased restrictions on tobacco advertising since the 1960s, indirect forms of advertising have flourished. One strategy that has allowed the tobacco industry to circumvent advertising bans is the practice of "brand-stretching" whereby tobacco-brand logos appear on nontobacco goods such as Camel boots and Salem holidays.

Whom Do Advertisements Target?

Pipe tobacco and cigars were firmly masculine products in the nineteenth century and remained so throughout the twentieth century. Tobacco advertisers therefore targeted men. The cigarette market was also conceptualized almost exclusively as male prior to World War I, although there were sporadic appeals to Western women smokers before 1918. In Britain, advertisements for mass-produced brands such as De Reske and Players targeted women as smokers from 1919. It was not until 1926 that a U.S. advertisement for a mass-produced brand addressed women as smokers, and not until 1927 that a woman was featured actually smoking. By the 1930s, North American advertising routinely featured women smoking cigarettes and even offering them to their male companions. In Australia, too, women smokers were regular features of cigarette advertising by this time. But although roughly one-quarter of all Australian cigarette advertisements included images of women between 1927 and 1937, only 6 percent focused exclusively on them. Since World War II, cigarette advertising has increasingly targeted women on a global scale.

Promotion of cigarettes outside Europe and North America began around 1900. China was the main foreign market for British American Tobacco and, in the early 1900s, cigarettes were promoted using out-door advertising, handbills, wall hangings, posters, and window displays. The global dimensions of cigarette advertising escalated dramatically after World War II. Latin America was targeted in the 1960s and the newly developed countries of Asia in the 1980s. Eastern Europe, territories previously in the USSR, China, and Africa were targeted aggressively in the 1990s. Tobacco brand advertising budgets were some of the largest of any product in countries such as Malaysia, Hong Kong, Kenya, Indonesia, and South China in the late 1980s. In many cases advertising was, and still is, unregulated.

The tobacco industry claims that its advertising does not target children. However, proportionately more ads were placed in U.S. women's and youth magazines between 1960 and 1985 than in those which targeted other groups of the population. In Britain in the 1980s, a study of magazines aimed at women and young people discovered that 58 percent with a readership predominantly under twenty-five years of age featured cigarette advertising, and that of those magazines whose numerically largest readership group was between fifteen and twenty-four years old, 93 percent carried cigarette advertisements. Young people were also being targeted in the 1980s in the new markets of Asia and Africa; for example, a group of teenagers breakdancing appeared in an advertisement on display in Malaysia. Scholars argue that direct advertising is not the only means by which young people are targeted by the tobacco industry. Representations of adult life can also be very appealing to teenagers: "Any marketer of products and services for adolescents knows that to appeal to youth, one needs to construct a campaign that looks as if it is a product for adults" (Chapman). An investigation into the advertising practices of the producers of Viceroy cigarettes in the 1970s revealed that young people were being deliberately courted by the American tobacco industry. Similar results emerged from an inquiry in 2000 into advertising for the U.K. tobacco industry.

Advertising Themes

National identity was a particular prominent theme in British pipe tobacco advertising around 1900 and included images of Queen Victoria, aristocrats, the military, aspects of British heritage and the British countryside. In Australia during World War I, themes of war, nationalism, and masculine identity were used to sell traditional forms of tobacco to men. In interwar Australia, where pipe and roll-your-own tobacco continued to surpass the sale of tailor-made cigarettes, advertisements emphasized masculine identity with stress on defending male space against female intrusion. Advertisements for cigars and pipe tobacco have continued to have male subjects and masculine themes.

Men and masculinities remained a staple of cigarette advertising. In interwar Australia, themes relating to male camaraderie and masculine anxieties were to the fore in the press. Cigarette advertising on Australian radio was also dominated by a series of masculine sea shanties. In the United States, most cigarette advertisements featured men even when women were targeted as smokers from the late 1920s. In Britain, too, men and masculinities were highly visible; indeed the most famous British icon was the sailor that appeared in advertisements for Player's cigarettes. Initially women were featured in tobacco advertisements to add a seductive element, but after 1920 they were increasingly visible as smokers in their own right.

Emancipation was a key theme in early cigarette advertising to British women. Women's liberation re-emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s as a theme in Western advertisements for "female cigarettes," most notably Virginia Slims: "You've come a long way, baby." Emancipation remained a prominent motif in 1980s and 1990s advertising to women in the former socialist countries of central and eastern Europe, plus Japan, Hong Kong, and Africa. Promising liberation as well as westernization to Hong Kong women in the 1980s, an advertisement for Virginia Slims declared, "You're on your way."

In advertisements, cigarette smoking has been associated with a high quality of life: health, leisure, pleasure, sexual attractiveness, affluence. Health and body issues were common themes in interwar advertisements targeted at Western men and women. Craven "A" cigarettes, for example, were marketed widely as "made especially to prevent sore throats." Smoking was also associated with feminine beauty and, in the United States, it was explicitly linked to slimness. Leisure has also been a prominent theme and from the 1930s companionate leisure often provided the context for smoking in advertisements in Australia, the United States, and Britain. Physical activity and the outdoors featured prominently in the 1930s as men and women smoked after a tennis match or while motoring together in the countryside. After World War II, joint leisure activities were more subdued and intimate; for example, bathing on a beach or relaxing by a roaring fire. A Western definition of the "good life" has remained a feature of much advertising to low and middle income countries; in the 1980s, a Fijian advertisement for Rothmans referred to a "great English tradition" while an Indian advertisement for Chesterfield's promoted "the smooth American experience."

From the 1960s, amid widespread publicity about the health risks of smoking, image became increasingly important to cigarette advertising, "not only because it was meant to confer its qualities on the smoker, but because it was designed to blind consumers to the true nature of what they were buying" (Taylor 1985). However, with the introduction of restrictions on tobacco advertising, advertisers have also been forced to rely less on featuring people and to make more inventive use of symbolism as in the 1980s campaigns for Benson & Hedges and Marlboro cigarettes. When advertising restrictions meant that the cowboy could no longer appear in Marlboro advertisements, Marlboro resorted to using the image of wild horses: "They knew that people would look at a pack of Marlboro and still see the cowboy" (Chapman).

Impact of Advertising

Concerns about children's exposure to tobacco advertising are underpinned by the belief that advertising is influential; this influence extends also to adults. Amid knowledge of the health risks of tobacco consumption, the tobacco industry has come under intense criticism for promoting smoking to new groups of potential smokers, especially children and women, and sustaining levels of consumption in established markets.

The influence of advertising is, however, strongly contested by the tobacco industry. The industry's position is that the sole purpose of advertising is to encourage smokers to change their allegiance to brands, and that advertising does not lead people to smoke or hinder their efforts to stop. The scholar Simon Chapman questions the veracity of this claim on three counts. First, all advertising seeks to maximize sales and even advertising industry workers are not convinced that the tobacco industry is any different. Second, advertising is used even in countries where the government has a monopoly on tobacco sales and where there is, therefore, no competition. Third, if advertising only influenced current smokers then it still follows that a ban on advertising may help reduce smoking.

Establishing a causal relationship between advertising and levels of smoking is not, however, straightforward. Methodological problems bedevil attempts to isolate and assess the influence of different types of advertising: "Unlike the effects of nicotine, advertising cannot be dosed and its effects observed physiologically" (Chapman). The reasons why people smoke are complex: "Tobacco advertising is . . . only one factor among many that appears to influence the decision to smoke. These include social, religious, parental, sibling and peer smoking behaviour and attitudes, price and disposable income, age limit proscriptions, measured intelligence and social class" (Chapman).

Isolating the significance of advertising for the promotion of smoking in the past is also difficult, as evident in the debate about the role of advertising in introducing Western women to cigarette smoking before World War II. The sociologist Michael Schudson argues that women did start to smoke prior to the first advertisements that targeted them and that news coverage of smokers helped in "the first instance to legitimise women's smoking"; advertising merely went on to reinforce and "naturalise" this practice (Schudson 1985). Others acknowledge that smoking had appeal for women prior to their direct targeting, but they argue that advertising "indirectly sought women smokers through images that emphasized the sociability and allure of the cigarette" (Brandt 1996). Cheryl Warsh points out that "cigarette advertising could have shaped women's views of what was masculine and therefore what would be an attractive aspiration for 'new women'" (Warsh 1998). Following the initiation of direct appeal to women in the United States, researchers argue, women's smoking increased at a faster rate than before.

Precise measurement of the effect, past and present, of tobacco advertising is elusive. It is, however, widely established that cigarette advertising contributes to a culture in which smoking is normalized and has a positive image. "Whether advertising initiates consumer trends or only reinforces them . . . it is impossible to ignore their wider role in providing people a general education in goods" (Schudson). Unattractive and negative ways of understanding smoking have often been suppressed by threats from the tobacco industry to deprive the media of advertising revenue. This threat is being eroded by the introduction of national bans on advertising. Studies indicate that a comprehensive set of tobacco advertising bans can reduce tobacco consumption, but that a limited set of advertising bans has little or no effect.

See Also Sponsorship.

? PENNY TINKLER

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snuff a form of powdered tobacco, usually flavored, either sniffed into the nose or "dipped," packed between cheek and gum. Snuff was popular in the eighteenth century but had faded to obscurity by the twentieth century.

cigarette cards paper trading cards sometimes featuring sports personalities or movie stars packaged with cigarettes and offered as an incentive for purchase.