EOC Week 3: Tobacco

The very first tobacco advertisement to come out in America was in the year 1789, "when the Lorillard brothers advertised their snuff and tobacco products in a local New York daily paper." (http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/eaa/tobacco.html) them for about 70 more years Tobacco ads looked the same. There were some pretty typical ads promoting that smoking was sexy, sophisticated and cool. The one ad I found pretty, um, interesting was an ad for Marlboro which is targeted at parents and features babies in the campaign. In 1950, Marlboros were promoted as a cigarette for mothers as stress relievers, but thank goodness it never caught on. The problem was that they still needed a target audience to sell their products to. Their strategy failed because they didn’t think through that mothers wouldn’t want their children exposed to smoke. So they had to quickly call on a brilliant advertising guru to come up with something new. “Famous advertising guru Leo Burnett helped the company to reposition Marlboro as a rugged man’s cigarette by inventing Marlboro Man. You know, rugged men galloping on fast horses on rugged countryside. Until then, filter cigarettes were not for real men.”(http://www.quitsmokingpainlesslynow.com/cigarette-advertising/marlboros-for-mummy/) Since these men wanted to be ‘real men,’ the Marlboro man was the perfect example for them to want to emulate. They didn’t have to outright say, smoke Marlboro’s and you’ll be this man. The way the Marlboro man was who men wanted to be and who women simply wanted. But I digress, back to the baby campaign. It actually does say that the miracle of Marlboro was that you never feel “over- smoked.” Wow what does that even mean? I’m not saying it’s horrible to smoke; I would be a hypocrite because I smoke, but to use babies to sell cigarettes I feel is like saying you would sell your own grandmother to make a quick buck. I’m just glad they ditched the babies for the Marlboro man.