The unlit cigarette was a tease, the cigarette held near a flame was a provocation, the cigarette stuck behind an ear was a promissory note, the cigarette held aloft was a sheathed knife, the cigarette held laterally was a broken arrow, the cigarette stubbed out was an ultimatum. It was like the language of flowers, or postage stamps. . . . It all resided in the beholder and the beheld, of course.
LUC SANTE, NO SMOKING, 2000
Sport has long been a tobacco target, but the same holds true for many other kinds of events where people gather—especially the young. Which is why a decision was made to sponsor festivals and parties, beginning especially in the 1970s and 1980s. The goal here was to identify where a coveted market target might congregate—college students at spring break hot spots, for example—and then to stage elaborately branded club events. South Padre Island in Texas and Florida’s Fort Lauderdale and Daytona Beach were prime early prospects, though the practice has since been globalized. Philip Morris has sponsored Marlboro “Red Zone” parties at Formula One racing events in Malaysia, and Vietnam’s National Tobacco Corporation has sponsored the Cambodian Water Festival to drum up support for its Golden Eagle brand. BAT stages similar events in Africa and in other parts of the world.
Marlboro parties seem to have emerged from Philip Morris’s Marlboro Resort Program, established in 1977 to target summer vacation spots frequented by young people. By 1990 the program was operating in eighteen cities for the July 4, Memorial Day, and Labor Day holidays. Marlboro’s 1989 Spring Break Program for South Padre Island included “pool deck parties” and a Marlboro Racing Sweepstakes, featuring as first prize a 1990 Camaro Z-28 convertible. Events of this sort were typically coordinated with local clubs—Charlie’s Paradise Bar and Country Club on South Padre Island, for example, which hooked up with Philip Morris by hosting a weeklong promotion of Virginia Slims during the 1987 spring break season. Charlie’s hosted the 1989 Marlboro Sweepstakes for which a total of ten thousand Marlboro items were distributed, including tank tops, beach towels, fanny packs, koozies, sunglasses, key rings, mugs, and lighters. Places like Charlie’s were happy to get the business and knew they could deliver, judging from the promise of club president Charles Lewis to Philip Morris for the 1990 season: “Charlie’s can guarantee exposure for your product [from] a minimum of 60,000 to a maximum of 100,000 college students between the ages of 18 and 25. This number of students will be paid admissions to our facility and represents an estimated 20%–25% of the total students at South Padre Island for Spring Break.”1 Bands were often hired for events, but party promotions also included amateur singing nights, dances, drinking parties, and other events where “performance” wasn’t really even in the cards. Philip Morris’s “Bar Promotions” in the 1990s, for example, included Marlboro Bar Nights, Party at the Ranch, Marlboro Country Dance, Marlboro Latin Dance, Parliament Party Zone (featuring games and sweepstakes), Virginia Slims Dueling Divas, Club Benson & Hedges (music), and a Merit Comedy series.2
Promotions of the sort described above have sometimes been characterized as contact sponsorships, a form of marketing especially popular from the 1980s onward. I’ve mentioned the spring break bashes at Daytona Beach and South Padre Island, but “club events” and less formal parties have also been staged. In Canada from 2000 to 2003, for example, Rothmans sponsored a series of “Goldclub” parties in the Kitchener-Waterloo area to push its Benson & Hedges brand. Goldclub events featured superstar deejays like Bad Boy Bill, go-go dancers in cages, circus performances, prizes of various sorts, and dancing girls dressed in B&H colors (gold and black) offering cigarettes for sale. The industry would sometimes also pay “cool people” to smoke in select bars and clubs; the technique is known as viral advertising or influential seeding, with the idea being that people will copy this fashion, which would then spread as if by infection.3
Party sponsorships from early on included “ethnic” festivals. Reynolds led with its Winston San Juan Fiesta in 1976 and then used its Salem Summer Street Scenes in 1981 “as a means of penetrating the Black Market.” Philip Morris organized competing Marlboro events at Carnival in Miami, Cinco de Mayo and Mexican Independence Day in Los Angeles, the Fiesta Del Sol in Chicago, the Fiesta de San Juan in New York, the Tejano Superfest in Houston, Charro Days and Calle Ocho in Miami, and so forth. Marlboro Hispanic Festivals typically involved a mix of entertainment, auto racing, Marlboro booths, banners, posters, sweepstakes, and distribution of “incentive items” such as lighters and caps, more than a hundred thousand of which were given out in 1982 alone. Spanish-language media were paid to cover the festivities—with the goal of making Marlboro “the primary focus of the festival.” Entertainment was carefully planned to provide “brand visibility to Marlboro while giving the audience the impression that Marlboro had discovered and presented the talent for everybody’s enjoyment.” Such sponsorships grew throughout the 1980s, and in 1988 alone Philip Morris added eighteen new events, plus a “Marlboro Menthol Inner City Bar Night Program for African Americans. Brown & Williamson sponsored Kool Jazz Festivals, which targeted blacks with cosponsorship from Kentucky Fried Chicken, Stroh’s Beer, and Exception black hair care products. Reynolds in 1982 predicted an increased opportunity in the form of “ethnic markets”—especially blacks and Hispanics—because of the “phenomenal growth rates” of such groups relative to the population as a whole. Blacks and Hispanics were also attractive because this market was “younger than the population as a whole,” with more than 40 percent of Hispanics being under eighteen years of age.4
Tobacco-wise, sponsorship of the arts has never been much different from sponsoring sports, though the markets are somewhat different. Museumgoers and NASCAR fans tend not to smoke the same brands of cigarettes, but smoking by the 1970s was also becoming more of a lower-class phenomenon, meaning a lower payoff (in terms of sales) for a dollar spent promoting the arts compared with a dollar spent on sports. The difficulty was expressed in a 1978 Philip Morris discussion of the “problem.” As one author put it, “The most important problem I see with sponsorship of the arts is that it reaches the wrong target group. In the main the arts are more of interest to the A/B class than to the lower social classes C and D. Smoking is becoming more and more a C/D class habit.” This same tobacconist concluded that “sport sponsorship fits the class and mass exposure criteria much better, and therefore sells more cigarettes per $ spent.”5
Quite apart from short-term sales, however, sponsorship of the arts was judged to have a certain “commercial value” by virtue of its impact on public relations. Sponsorship created an attractive image for a company but also a certain useful dependency—and not just for connoisseurs or performers. Promoters and organizers were in effect “hooked,” making it hard to refuse tobacco money or hard even to perform without. In a 1994 exposé for the Village Voice Alisa Solomon dubbed this “The Other Nicotine Addiction,” asking what by now should sound like a very strange question, “Can there be art without tobacco?”6
Big Tobacco has sponsored hundreds if not thousands of art exhibits, dance performances, museum shows, and concerts.7 The goal has generally been less to attract smokers than to gain good feeling among the cultural elite. Sponsorship buys a kind of silence or, if need be, political support. Dozens of the world’s leading theaters and museums have taken tobacco money—in New York alone this includes the Museum of Modern Art, the American Folk Art Museum, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Guggenheim Museum, the American Ballet Theatre, the American Museum of Natural History, the Dance Theater of Harlem, and quite a few others. BAT has supported the London Symphony Orchestra; Imperial and Gallaher have supported Glyrodeboume and Covent Garden; Benson & Hedges (BAT) has put on the Australian Ballet; Philip Morris has sponsored Pavarotti.
The tobacco companies defend such acts as philanthropy, but of course they want something in return: “innocence by association,” as one watchdog website puts it. Or as Peter Taylor writes in his Smoke Ring, BAT sponsors the Philharmonia to get us to associate cigarettes with “Elgar and Tchaikovsky, instead of cancer and bronchitis.” As in sports, though, there is no point to sponsorship if the company’s name cannot be made visible. The sponsoring corporation is identified on tickets and programs—and sometimes even in the title of the event. When Philip Morris sponsored the Marlboro Country Music Festival at New York’s Lincoln Center, the name of the world’s most popular cigarette was splashed across the marquee. The juxtaposition may seem odd, but ads for the festival came with a Surgeon General’s warning.8
Sampling is not unknown at such events. In 1994, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art sponsored an exhibit on the origins of Impressionism, a journalist at the opening remarked on how the smoking of free cigarettes had led to the Temple of Dendur being “enveloped in a cloud of smoke.” Art-oriented sponsorships have prompted spiritual benedictions, as in 1987, at the Met’s Treasures of the Vatican, when the Catholic archbishop of New York led a prayer for George Weissman, president of the sponsoring corporation. A Philip Morris vice president later remarked that his was probably “the only cigarette company on this earth to be blessed by a cardinal.” Payback more often takes less spiritual forms—as in 1990, when the artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (Judith Jamison) allowed her name to be used in ads for Philip Morris—wherein smoking was defended essentially as a form of free speech. The dance company testified in support of the industry before the U.S. Congress that same year, following which (in 1991) the dancers accepted half a million dollars from the Marlboro maker.
Not all such sponsorships are for adults. In 2005 Altria—the new name for Philip Morris as of 2002—sponsored a string of performances of Maurice Sendak’s Brundibar at Berkeley’s Repertory Theatre. I once asked the producers how they felt about having a cigarette maker sponsor a play for children, and their sheepish defense was basically that money has to be taken wherever it can be found. That is part of the problem: we live in a world where funding for the arts is not easy to come by. Tobacco companies in the United States helped fill a void created by Ronald Reagan’s withdrawal of support for the arts in the 1980s—making collaborations of this sort more attractive. Performance Space 122 artistic director, Mark Russell, when asked what he thought about such sponsorships replied, “Of course they’re using us. We’re using them too.”9
Music has been another solid tobacco platform, and for many of the same reasons. Collaborations of this sort date back to the 1920s and 1930s, when popular radio shows were sponsored by cigarette makers: the Lucky Strike Radio Hour, the Lucky Strike Hit Parade, the Al Pearce Show for Camel Cigarettes, the Chesterfield Supper Club, and so forth. Sponsorships continued into the television era, until the broadcast ban of 1971 forced the industry to seek other outlets.
Philip Morris in 1982, for example, began its “Marlboro Music” program, sponsoring the gamut of genres from rock and classical to folk, Latin, and rhythm & blues. Country music was the focus for the first seven years, as Philip Morris filled one arena after another with shows featuring Alabama, Hank Williams Jr., Randy Travis, George Strait, Reba McEntire, Merle Haggard, Dolly Parton, and countless others, all of whom became veterans of the Marlboro circuit. Marlboro Music was broadened to include rock and roll in 1990, by which time sponsorships had been extended to state and county fairs. Military bases became a target in 1989, when Latin shows and “top names from the genres of Rock, Country and/or R&B” were incorporated. Industry-sponsored concerts were often innovative: Marlboro’s country music events, for example, were among the first to use video displays to augment spectacular sound and lights.10
Brown & Williamson focused more on jazz than on country or rock, no doubt because it already had a strong African American base with its menthol-flavored Kools. The Kool Jazz Festivals—launched in 1975—were part of the company’s “Kool Brand Strategic Plan,” designed to maintain the current “Kool ethnic franchise” but also to entice “young adult starting smokers and non-menthol switchers.”11 Millions of dollars went into acquiring top musical talent for these events, with performers including Aretha Franklin, B. B. King, the Isley Brothers, Smokey Robinson, the Pointer Sisters, the Temptations, and numerous others. By 1982 the company was running twenty events in twenty different cities, using jazz as a means of reaching young blacks and Hispanics. Here again the plan was to expropriate an already existing cultural icon: the Newport Jazz Festival had been founded by jazz maverick George Wein in 1954 (with financial support from Elaine Lorillard, heiress of the Lorillard tobacco fortune), and all Brown & Williamson did was to (dramatically) expand the event while also changing the name to highlight its flagship menthol brand.
The beauty of this scoop was that “Newport” was also the name of the leading competitive threat to Kool. Lorillard’s Newport brand had been growing in popularity among African Americans since the 1950s, and by attaching the Kool name to the festival Brown & Williamson achieved a kind of marketing double whammy. (For a while, though, the Newport event had the oddly chimerical title “Kool Newport Jazz Festival”—odd by virtue of the fact that Kool and Newport were cigarette brands made by separate companies.) Kool Jazz Festivals drew millions of aficionados, but the cigarette brand was made further visible via Kool Jazz Records, Kool City Jams (in fifteen cities), Kool Super Nights at military installations, and the Kool Newport Jazz Festival scholarship for jazz musicians at the Juilliard School of Music. Brown & Williamson commissioned detailed studies of the perception of such events and found that people who had heard about the concerts were significantly more likely to have “quality and satisfaction perceptions of the KOOL brand.” They were also more than twice as likely to buy Kool cigarettes. People who knew about the concerts were also far more likely to think highly of the company doing the sponsoring.12
Musicians usually appreciated this support. George Wein, producer of the Newport/Kool events, once characterized Brown & Williamson’s support as “incredible[,] . . . a great bonanza for jazz,” and “like a dream come true.” Wein seems not to have recognized (or cared about) sponsorships as a vehicle for selling cigarettes. Jazz clubs have been notoriously smoky over the years, which is no doubt one reason so many jazz greats have succumbed to lung cancer (see the box on page 124). Marketers at Brown & Williamson were quite pleased with the fact that its Kool Jazz Festivals had become “an excellent, if not the best, way to reach over half a million Blacks directly and create awareness of Kool among many more.”13
Interesting in all of this, again, is the distinction between advertising the brand and advertising the company: the brand was featured when an event was designed to sell cigarettes; the company was featured when the event was supposed to spread goodwill. So “Marlboro” typically didn’t sponsor events at the Met or the Guggenheim; that was the job of Philip Morris. Reynolds funded academic appointments; Winston sponsored racing. Recall also that “sponsoring” an artistic or musical event rarely meant just giving someone money. Signage and sampling rights were usually part of the deal, and the sponsoring company typically got exclusive rights to set up banners and booths for distributing brand-themed merchandise. All of these were involved in Philip Morris’s 1990 sponsorship of the Summer Lights Festival in Nashville, Tennessee,14 as in most other industry-financed happenings.
Not all musicians agreed to take tobacco money. In the summer of 1983, when James Taylor and Peter, Paul, and Mary learned that a concert for which they had been scheduled (on the Boston Commons) was sponsored by R. J. Reynolds, they refused to perform. The cigarette maker was eliminated as a sponsor, and the show went on as planned—absent the cigarette pitch. Hall and Oates have turned down tobacco money, as have the Oak Ridge Boys and a number of other groups. Pete Seeger resigned from the Weavers (in 1958) when the group decided to make a cigarette jingle. Not everyone will do anything for a buck.
Collaboration seems to have been more common than resistance, however. Thousands of musicians have performed at events organized by the industry. Barbara Mandrell was supported by Marlboro, and Juice Newton and Alabama’s tour of 1983 was sponsored by Salem. Philip Morris used to keep a list of talent for use in such events, as did most of the other companies. Artists have always been carefully chosen to match the target audience: so when Reynolds organized the Salem Harlem Week Music Festival in New York, artists were chosen to appeal to the target black community. The goal in each case has been to reach “a highly targeted mass audience at an event which is associated with the brand.”15 Which is also why cigarette makers have encouraged public involvement in music as performers in company-sponsored competitions.
AMERICAN JAZZ GREATS KNOWN TO HAVE DIED FROM LUNG CANCER
Kenny Rankin, vocalist |
d. 2009 |
Haydain Neale, member Jacksoul |
d. 2009 |
Joe Beck, guitarist |
d. 2008 |
Dave McKenna, pianist |
d. 2008 |
Leroy Jenkins, violinist |
d. 2007 |
George Melly, vocalist |
d. 2007 |
Albert Timothy Eyermann, instrumentalist |
d. 2007 |
Lou Rawls, soul singer |
d. 2006 |
Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, fiddle and guitar |
d. 2005 |
Preston Love, saxophone, Count Basie’s band |
d. 2004 |
Walter Perkins, Chicago drummer |
d. 2004 |
Ruby Braff, trumpet |
d. 2003 |
Rosemary Clooney, singer |
d. 2002 |
Marion Montgomery, singer |
d. 2002 |
Billy Mitchell, tenor saxophone, Count Basie’s band |
d. 2001 |
Donald Tecumseh “Tee” Carson, Count Basie’s band |
d. 2000 |
Lee Allen, saxophone |
d. 1994 |
Eric Gale, guitar |
d. 1994 |
John Carter, clarinet |
d. 1991 |
Art Blakey, drummer and band leader |
d. 1990 |
Sarah Vaughan, singer |
d. 1990 |
Paul Desmond, alto saxophone, with Dave Brubeck |
d. 1977 |
Duke Ellington, bandleader |
d. 1974 |
Don Byas, saxophone, Count Basie’s band |
d. 1972 |
Ike Quebec, saxophone |
d. 1963 |
Jimmy Dorsey, bandleader |
d. 1957 |
Vic Berton, drummer |
d. 1951 |
In 1989, for example, Philip Morris launched a “grassroots” promotional scheme with its Marlboro Music Talent Roundup. Amateurs were invited to fill out a form and send in a cassette, from which a select few were chosen to move on to regional and national tryouts—something like an early version of American Idol. The winner of the 1989 competition, a group called Angel Train, toured military bases (“selected by military sales to meet their sale objectives”) together with Poco and .38 Special. The industry has a long history of encouraging mass participation: Allan Brandt in his Cigarette Century recounts how in the 1930s two million Americans filled out elaborate forms for a chance to win a $100,000 prize from Lorillard, makers of Old Gold cigarettes.16 “Contesticians” spent an average of 80 hours researching and writing their answers, which means that something on the order of 160 million hours were squandered on such nonsense. Philip Morris continues such tricks in the new millennium, asking people to send in their favorite chili recipes as part of a Marlboro promotion. “50 Winning Chili Recipes” were published in 2002—from a pool of some 25,000 recipes submitted.
Another ploy from the 1980s was to sponsor “adventure travel” to remote parts of the world where “the man or woman who wants a challenge, not a snapshot,” would raft, climb, or trek through spectacular hostile/lush terrain as part of a brand-themed extravaganza. Reynolds was the pioneer here, sponsoring Camel Expeditions to exotic locales that could then be filmed and broadcast as branded bravado posing as frontier sport. Extreme sports management was in fine form in the Camel Expeditions, which in 1981 included a rafting trip on the Allagash in Maine, a two-week trek through Ecuador, and a ten-day sailing and diving adventure in the Caribbean. Thomas Cook Travel helped Reynolds plan and run these junkets, for which seventeen thousand brochures were sent out to agents. Subsequent Camel Expeditions included the Great Borneo Traverse of 1983, a Camel Ski Adventure, and a Camel Mount Everest Circumnavigation. A million-dollar advertising blitz invited participants to take one of these “rugged, demanding, memorable” adventures “into the unknown and unexpected”; applicants were assured that the experience would leave them “forever changed.”
For there is an adventurer’s heart in millions of us. No matter how comfortable, civilized or sophisticated we become, we share a deep and natural yearning for the primitive.
As the wilderness calls to us, it shrinks. It retreats even as we treasure it, becoming less and less accessible. Still, common knowledge tells us there is no mass market for adventure travel.
Perhaps that was so.
Until now.
Until Thomas Cook and R. J. Reynolds combined to create and promote The Camel Expeditions.
Never before has adventure travel—or any group travel package—received such massive promotion.17
The ultimate goal, as revealed in unpublished corporate correspondence, was somewhat less breathtaking. Camel Expeditions were envisioned as “an excellent way to build the perception of Camel cigarettes among its target smoker audience.” Film crews were hired to “document” the adventure for use in subsequent publicity, as was done for the 1982 Camel International Speed Skiing Championship. The idea was to associate the Camel name with noble risks and epic masculinity—and to have this reported in the popular press. Which seems to have worked rather well. The 1982 Camel Expeditions program generated “nearly 60 million print impressions and more than 15 million television and 6 million radio impressions,” including stories in the New York Times and other major news outlets, along with coverage by newswire services and network television.18 Similar coverage was given to a “Winston Recovery Team” trip to Greenland, a trek through Borneo and Papua New Guinea, the circumnavigation of Everest, and a Camel Arapahoe race. Cigarette companies in other parts of the world sponsored similar events: Export “A” (RJR-Macdonald’s Canadian brand) sponsored men’s downhill ski racing in Canada, for example, and other extreme sports. The point was to associate smoking with pushing the limits, living fearlessly on the edge; smokers were to be imagined as intrepid adventurers, people who are willing to take chances. Extreme cowboys, one could say, who won’t let the “Big C” drag them down (as John Wayne used to say before he succumbed).
Not every effort along these lines was successful. Philip Morris in 1995 made a big deal of its Marlboro Unlimited Sweepstakes, offering two thousand Marlboro smokers an opportunity to travel on a specially outfitted luxury train, a third of a mile long, through America’s remote western mountains and basins. Fanfare for the gimmick lasted for a couple of heavily promoted years, but by 1997, with the industry facing PR problems and onerous litigation, the plan was scrapped. Eighteen finished luxury cars were dismantled by Denver’s Rader Railcar, and Philip Morris took a $50 million bath on the botched project.
Since the 1980s the tobacco industry has found many new ways to advertise. Companies pay retailers to guarantee product placement and pay bartenders to flash target brands in high-status social clubs. Event sponsorship has spun off into support for film festivals and fashion shows—with fashion in particular conceived as a way to reach female smokers.
Fashion has been a cigarette hook since the 1920s, when American Tobacco organized green gown fund-raising balls and “Green Fashion Fall” luncheons to promote colors that would match the (green) Lucky Strike pack. The 1970s incarnations, however, were nationwide in scope and directed at a more diverse audience. R. J. Reynolds sponsored all 158 Ebony Fashion Fairs in the 1975–76 season, for example, with the goal of popularizing More cigarettes among African Americans. In the 1980s this same company sponsored the More Bloomingdale’s Program to reach upscale smokers. More-brand Ebony Fashion Fairs involved sampling, door prizes, models with wardrobes selected by the cigarette maker, plus of course ads in local media. Philip Morris piled on with extravagant, two-week Virginia Slims Fashion Fun Fairs incorporating beauty makeovers, hair styling, color analysis, wardrobe coordination, antique jewelry appraisal, and showings of the film You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby. Lorillard for its part ran Newport swimwear shows and body art exhibitions featuring “Newport inspired” pseudo-tattoos on models hired for that purpose.19
Disaster relief has also been used to boost corporate images. Philip Morris in 1989, for example, capitalized on Hurricane Hugo by helping to finance cleanup operations. “Our corporate-wide disaster relief made a series of splendid hits in the aftermath of Hurricane Hugo,” is how Corporate Affairs put it, when it thought no one would be listening. The cleanup and surrounding publicity yielded “solid and positive reaction to our activity from Puerto Rican and South Carolina officials,” the company claimed.20 No calamity seems too big, judging from Japan Tobacco’s 2009 sponsorship of a memorial (in Vienna) to the victims of Hiroshima—with no mention of the inconvenient truth that smokers are exposed to more deadly radiation from cigarettes than from any other source.
New techniques have also been devised to get around advertising bans. Philip Morris developed its Marlboro Classics line of clothing and camping gear, for example, to keep the brand name in circulation. The same purpose was served by the company’s Marlboro Country Store, established as a mail order catalog in 1972 for cowboy items such as belts, boots, and Stetson hats. One advantage of advertising in this form is that manufacturers don’t have to affix warning labels of any kind—and brand names can end up circulating long after their initial purchase. Search “Marlboro” on eBay, for example, and you’ll find hundreds of items for sale, mostly clothing, cookbooks, camping gear, and other products designed to keep that hallmark brand on display.
The trick is known as brand stretching, indirect advertising, alibi advertising, co-advertising, or trademark diversification, and has been deliberately developed to get around advertising bans. A 1979 internal document from BAT explained how the company could keep its brands in view, even with a total ban on advertising: “Opportunities should be explored by all companies so as to find non-tobacco products, and other services which can be used to communicate the brand or house name, together with their essential visual identifiers. This is likely to be a long-term and costly operation, but the principal way nevertheless to ensure that cigarette brands can be effectively publicised when all direct forms of communication are denied.”21 BAT followed this recommendation when it unveiled its Lucky Strike Leisure Wear in 1991, but the technique has been deployed all over the globe. In Hong Kong, for example, RJR Nabisco established a Salem Attitude line of clothing “to extend the Trademark beyond tobacco category restrictions.”22 Marlboro Classics stores have been set up in more than a dozen countries to sell jeans, belts, boots, jackets, wallets, and sundry forms of outdoor gear. Reynolds has done the same with its Camel Trophy Clothing, Camel Adventure Gear, Camel Music, Camel Planet (a nightclub promotion), Camel Party Zone CDs, and so forth. The brand name is insinuated into popular culture by attaching it to items that have only fantasy associations with smoking. Brand stretching has been widely deployed in Asia, especially for items likely to be used by teenagers. So in Thailand cigarette logos have appeared on notebooks, kites, pants, earrings, and chewing gum. In Romania Reynolds somehow got its Camel brand name emblazoned onto traffic lights—the actual parts that turn green or red. And in the Czech Republic Camel has even sponsored weddings.23 The scale and scope of such activities is impressive. By the mid-1990s more than a thousand Marlboro Classics stores had been established in Europe and Asia. R. J. Reynolds had fifteen Camel clothing stores in Thailand and Malaysia alone. The idea is that people will walk around displaying branded merchandise, becoming mobile ads for the brand. Reynolds for many years had a special merchandising division to handle such sales, which in 1975 topped more than a million items in the United States alone. The company’s marketers celebrated this as a million “ ‘walking billboards’ for our brand.”24
Malaysia has become a proving ground for many such efforts, following the banning of more traditional forms of advertising (television, magazines, billboards, etc.) in the early 1990s. BAT established a chain of Benson & Hedges Bistros in the capital city of Kuala Lumpur in 1998, with menus, sugar packs, staff outfits, and the eatery itself decked out in the cigarette’s trademark golden colors. Salem Cool Planet had seven outlets in Malaysia by the end of the 1990s and further spread the cigarette via brand-themed concerts. BAT for a time used the locally popular brand Perilly’s to sponsor movies in the country, and the Peter Stuyvesant Travel Agency was established by Rothmans to push that brand. Reynolds drew criticism in the early 1990s when it advertised Salem High Country tours—which apparently existed in name only. The company was using this fictional entity simply to keep the Salem name on television, contra the broadcast ban.25 Similar tricks were tried in Thailand, where ads appeared for luxurious “Kent Leisure Holidays.” Is it fraud to advertise a product that does not exist?
Coffee has been another advertising vehicle in Malaysia. In 1996 BAT started a line of Benson & Hedges Quality Blend Coffee to capitalize on—and reinforce—rituals linking coffee and cigarettes. One shop manager in Kuala Lumpur was quite open about the purpose behind such endeavors: “Of course this is all about keeping the Benson & Hedges brand name to the front. We advertise the Benson & Hedges Bistro on television and in the newspapers. The idea is to be smoker-friendly. Smokers associate a coffee with a cigarette. They are both drugs of a type.” BAT about this time confirmed that it had set up a subsidiary to look into Lucky Strike clothing, John Player special whiskey, and a Kent travel agency: “Yes, these products share the trademarks of our tobacco products—luxury products have done that for years—but they should not be caught by any marketing restrictions because we are not selling cigarettes with them. The [advertising] regulators could rightly be suspicious if the products do not stand on their own feet but as serious revenue-generating products then I think the regulators do not have a case.” A BAT official close to the campaign observed that such products were “a logical step” for cigarette makers: “They are running out of markets in which they can openly advertise. So the thinking is, well ‘Okay, if we can’t advertise cigarettes we will advertise another product which will have a halo effect on the cigarette brand.’ ”26
Efforts to establish similar “halo effects” can be found in Romania, where the transnationals have come up with schemes to circumvent a 2000 law banning ads in the vicinity of schools and medical facilities. BAT can no longer advertise cigarettes directly, but it has managed to put up banners bearing Kent cigarette slogans such as “Smooth Transmission” and “True: Performance.” Philip Morris has banners for L&M announcing, “Get Smooth and Get Going.” Both companies’ banners were on display at the Agronomy Faculty in Bucharest as recently as 2006.27 Romania joined the European Union in 2007, and it remains to be seen what trickery will be tried when EU-wide regulations are enforced. The stakes are high, given that Romanian teens have one of the highest smoking rates in Europe.
The Chinese have come up with equally clever ways to circumvent that country’s 1995 ad ban. One trick has been to advertise not the cigarette but rather the cigarette factory—which often has the same name as the brand. So billboards splash the words “Honghe Cigarette Factory” across a bright red background with a fast car or motorcycle front and center. Manufacturers also use the names of famous temples or monuments to sell cigarettes. Huanghelou, for example, is both a brand of cigarette and a famous temple in Hubei; and the Ningbo Factory’s Dahongying brand captures the cultural panache of China’s most beloved Neolithic site (from where rice is said to have originated). The country’s much-smoked Chunghwa brand has China itself as its name and the famous cloud-winged marble pillar of Tiananmen Square—the Huabiao—right on the pack. The point is to identify cigarette brands with beloved sites or sacred icons, as if we here in the United States had, say, “Liberty” or “Christ” cigarettes festooned with the Liberty Bell or a crucifix—or a cowboy for that matter. The packs are designed to entice in the manner of a miniature ad, but the sites themselves can be harnessed to carry the manufacturer’s message.
This hijacking of symbols has become quite widespread. The Virgin Mary is used to sell cigarettes in the Philippines, just as Shakespeare is used for this purpose in Great Britain (Benson & Hedges once sold a Hamlet brand, though I have also seen a Romeo y Julieta brand from Havana). Angkor cigarettes are sold in Cambodia, Great Wall cigarettes in Hong Kong, Red Star cigarettes in North Korea, Taj Mahal cigarettes in India, and Sumer cigarettes in Iraq. The hope of course is that the referenced place or object will evoke the cigarette, so that when you think about pandas or cowboys or some temple in China your thoughts may drift to that faraway place—and the cigarette bearing its name. The use of symbols in this manner also has a certain political value: in China, for example, one argument against graphic warnings has been that these would deface venerated national symbols. In reality, though, it is the tobacco factories that are abusing Chinese life and symbols.
Perhaps even more disturbing in the Chinese context is that schools are being used to promote tobacco. The Ningbo Cigarette Factory has been building libraries for schools in many parts of China and naming these after its popular Dahongying brand. Tobacco companies helped rebuild schools after the Wenchuan earthquake in 2008, in exchange for which they were allowed to place gigantic ads on the schools’ walls. Sichuan Tobacco Hope Primary School in the Wenchuan area has huge permanent wall lettering instructing students, “Genius comes from hard work; Tobacco helps you to be successful.” There are at least seventeen “Hope Primary Schools” named after sponsoring tobacco firms, all in poorer parts of the country. China is home to the youngest known person ever to have been taught to smoke (a two-year-old from Chongqing—though an Indonesian kid about the same age—Ardi Rizal—has recently become an Internet sensation), and efforts to advertise even in elementary schools show the callous shortsightedness of the country’s state-run Tobacco Monopoly Administration.28
Tobacco-pack art presents us with a kind of micro-advertising, and it is important to realize how diverse such images have been in the century since the rise of the modern cigarette. I have seen Boy Scout cigarettes, Eros cigarettes, and Sport cigarettes; and in Japan we have Hope and Peace smokes, both with name brands in English, interestingly. The Tong Nam Tobacco Company in Singapore for a time manufactured My Dear cigarettes, and Nanyang Brothers in China used to sell a Double Happiness brand. Cigarette names are sometimes politically charged: China in its early Communist era had a Liberation cigarette, for example, while the Soviets had a Sputnik brand celebrating the world’s first artificial satellite and a Laika brand honoring the first dog in space—both of which boasted hammer and sickle designs on the pack (Laika didn’t make it back to earth alive, a fact not mentioned in Soviet-era ads). German political parties in the 1920s and 1930s made and sold cigarettes to generate income: the Nazi Party’s Brownshirts had their own brands—Sturm, Alarm, and Front, for example—and some cigarette companies incorporated swastikas into their cigarette pack art (Nortag, for example). Some such associations are ironic: in China a number of lung cancer victims live in a Kunming housing project called Red Pagoda Gardens, named for the tobacco company (Red Pagoda) that supplied the funds for it to be built. Several countries in Asia have had Long Life or Longevity brands.
Health has long been a theme in naming brands. The Axton-Fisher Company in Kentucky in the 1930s sold a Listerine brand cigarette (Figure 20)—marketed as a remedy for colds—and a Greek company more recently evoked health with its Santé brand. (Denmark also used to have a brand by this name.) Health has been implied in many Asian brands: herbal cigarettes are commonly smoked in China, for example, and you often find brands with names like Ginseng or Hong Gou Qi, with the healing root or herb featured prominently on the pack. Some generics in the United States are named for the pharmacy chains that sell them—which is why we find Rite Aid Quality Seal Cigarettes and the like. In 2011 Safeway still sells cigarettes, violating the assurance in the supermarket chain’s very name.
Sport has long been a theme of cigarette pack art. Canadians in the 1890s smoked an Athlete brand, for example, and early American brands had names like Home Run, Knockout, and Hole-in-One Golf. Europeans jumped on this same bandwagon. A Dutch company in the 1930s sold a Sport brand featuring a big soccer ball on the front of the pack; BATCo Amsterdam sold Race Cigarettes featuring a revved-up hot rod; and Swedes in the 1960s smoked a Chessman cigarette. A Singapore company used to sell a Golfer pack, and as late as the 1970s Liggett sold its nostalgic Home Run brand with images of vintage baseball players on the pack. Sport itself has been a cigarette in many parts of the world; the Wiki-site Cigarettespedia in 2009 listed eighteen different brands with this name.
What trick has not been tried? High fashion is evoked in brands such as Ritz, Cartier Vendome, and Pierre Cardin, but brand names have also included Love (1968), Space (1958), and Sex Bomb (1912). I myself own a pack of Texas brand cigarettes from Rhodesia, some Harley Davidsons made by Lorillard, and a Revelation brand tobacco tin from Philip Morris’s Factory No. 15 in Virginia. The Swiss in the 1920s sold Nadir cigarettes, and Germany’s A. Batschari about this time sold a Radium brand—which may or may not have contained the precious isotope. Some brands are jokes: witness Horse Shit cigarettes (“stable blended . . . not a fart in a car load”) or the same company’s Go to Hell brand (“I like ’em and I’m going to smoke ’em . . . Cheaper than psychiatry, better than a nervous breakdown”). Some of these humor packs are morbid: Black Death cigarettes, for example, come with a top-hatted skull on the front and a Jolly Roger on the back. More serious are the packs specially made for distribution during presidential campaigns. I have seen Bush, Nixon, Dukakis, and Eisenhower cigarettes, but surely there are others. Special cigarettes have also been made for the presidential retreat at Camp David (by Liggett) and the presidential yacht Sequoia (by Philip Morris).
With opportunities for traditional advertising curtailed, new ways to keep the product in view are constantly being devised. One avenue has been to build more advertising into the packaging itself. Cigarette pack art has become one of the final frontiers of advertising, a “media vehicle” in Philip Morris-speak: “As media restrictions increase, the brand pack should become a media vehicle. The ‘book pack’ objective is to transform the pack from a ‘passive container’ into an ‘active means of communication,’ an object that projects an image and a lifestyle by itself.”29 Marketers have been creative in fashioning point-of-sale and specifically point-of-pack marketing. When tobacco ads were banned in Canada in 2003, cigarette marketers responded by setting up “power walls” in retail stores consisting of huge stacks of packs that function more or less as billboard ads. Cigarette makers pay a premium for retail display space close to checkout counters, realizing that this will encourage impulse buying. Impulse buying is a big part of cigarette sales, which makes sense when we consider the deeply irrational nature of the habit. Smoking is not a rational act: witness the force of symbolic goading and affect-rich promotions. Smoking is also increasingly an affliction of the poor and mentally infirm, which helps explain why cigarettes are one of the most commonly shoplifted items in many parts of the world.
Point-of-pack advertising has blossomed as a result of macro-advertising bans, as cigarette makers capitalize on the fact that cigarettes are objects of intimacy for smokers. Smokers who reach for a cigarette, say, twenty times a day will end up fondling those packs some 7,300 times per year—whence the incentive to exploit this intimacy. Reynolds has developed special “series” or “collectors’ editions” packs, some of which sport graphics by up-and-coming artists. Reynolds in the mid-1990s put NASCAR scenes on its Winston Cup packs to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of racing sponsorship, and in the new millennium introduced packs featuring the signed designs of well-known tattoo artists. The artists get good exposure, and Reynolds gets its cigarettes linked to a popular teenage fashion. Which is also why tobacco control advocates call for banning all brand imagery (and color) on all cigarette packs—and graphic warnings covering some large fraction of any pack’s surface. The world leader here is Uruguay, which now requires all cigarettes sold in that country to have graphic warnings covering at least 80 percent of the pack—front and back. Australia has also recently passed a law allowing no brand art whatsoever on any cigarette packaging, with a target onset date of 2012.
It would be impossible to list all of the ways the industry has marketed its products; there are simply too many.30 In a sense everything they do is a form of marketing, just as everything is done with an eye to the threat of litigation. Marketing is not inherently a black art, but that is what the smoke folk have turned it into. And since cigarettes are the world’s leading preventable cause of death, marketers are complicit in that mortality. We need to think more broadly about these myriad causal links chaining us to smoking, insofar as these are links that might be broken. We also have to keep in mind that if cigarettes cause cancer, then so does everything that causes cigarettes to be made and people to smoke them. We don’t think often and hard enough about the “causes of causes,” which is crucial for understanding how we might free ourselves from this deadly bond.31