by Allan Brandt
According to Braren, when confronted by data indicating that the tobacco industry was ignoring the code, the NAB had done nothing for fear of losing the immense revenues coming from tobacco advertising. Apparently Clair R. McCullough, chairman of the code board, had found Braren’s critiques “too rigid” and offered the criterion “when in doubt, okay.”79 Braren testified that a network vice president who was a member of the code board had told the Code Authority “to stay clear of cigarette advertising for fear that any action would lead to forcing all cigarette advertising off television.”80 Industry cooperation with the code had been “token,” according to Braren, and eventually the Code Authority had virtually stopped trying to monitor and regulate tobacco ads. “The NAB strategy,” he concluded, “has been to avoid meaningful self-regulatory action as long as the possibility exists that Congress will enact legislation favorable to the broadcasting and tobacco industries.”81
Braren was outraged that the NAB, with its voluntary Code Authority as the watchdog for tobacco ads, had simply become a rubber stamp for the financial interests of the broadcasting industry. “The broadcast industry has had ample opportunity to demonstrate its willingness and ability to enact a truly responsible and meaningful program to self-regulate broadcast cigarette advertising,” he said. “Congress gave broadcasters this opportunity in 1965. The NAB and the Code Authority have failed in this public trust.” Prior to his testimony, Braren had been fired by the Code Authority, and in openly hostile questioning, the industry’s congressional allies sought to portray him as a disgruntled former employee. Braren’s testimony was an embarrassment to both the broadcasters and the tobacco companies, who had maintained that they were participating in a scrupulous program of self-regulation.82
The debate about controls on tobacco ads illuminated the complex set of interests and power that would prove to be important obstacles in bringing tobacco under any particular regulatory regime. The roots of tobacco had deeply penetrated the economic and financial structures of American industry, media, and politics. As a result, the tobacco industry could exercise its considerable economic influence to dilute, if not defeat, regulatory initiatives. As the broadcasters demonstrated, in the political sphere, the industry demonstrated an impressive ability to co-opt allies.
Despite the two industries’ assurances, it soon became clear to those monitoring tobacco ads that the Cigarette Advertising Code was having little impact; whenever the companies found it intrusive, they simply ignored it. In any case, the restrictions themselves were so vague and under-specified that they would have been all but impossible to implement. “That’s the reason no one is really worried about the code,” explained an advertiser in 1966. “They can’t stop us from showing good-looking people doing good-looking things.”83 And although baseball heroes like Phil Rizzuto and Bobby Thompson lost their endorsements, there remained myriad and subtle ways to promote the product under the new “rules.” As one advertising agent explained:We’re not trying to sell cigarettes, we’re selling a way of life, an exclusive club which has its own song, its own passwords, and a membership of millions. You say, “Come on over to the L&M side.” You talk about “Marlboro Country”; and you form an in-group of “Us Viceroy Smokers” and create an image of the swinging people who smoke your brand. We’re saying, “Look attractive, feel at ease, smoke Burpos with that filter of straw or that carcinogenic taste, and you’ll never again be lonely.”84
Some advertisers, in an exercise of conscience, refused to use their skills to recruit smokers. In 1964, as the discussion of advertising restrictions and labeling heated up, David Ogilvy, the chairman of Ogilvy, Benson & Mather, announced that his agency would not accept cigarette accounts.85 He called cigarette commercials “disgraceful . . . villainy.”86
The Cigarette Advertising Code and the threat of further regulation offered a powerful reminder to industry and advertisers alike that the cigarette had always conflated product and meaning. With little else to distinguish them, brands had always been a mechanism of self-identity. Now, given a more complex legal and regulatory environment, advertisers would demonstrate their full range of creative skills in circumventing the (relatively innocuous) restrictions. In 1970, the industry abandoned the code. The three companies that still claimed to follow it decided to stop submitting their ads for review. The code had served its purpose—it had bought the industry some time as it fought FTC efforts to mandate a warning label in advertisements—but the pretense was no longer worth the money or the trouble.87
As we have seen, the industry had prosecuted a two-front offensive in the emerging tobacco wars. While deploying considerable resources on obscuring and denying the emerging scientific data, including the surgeon general’s report, the industry also worked to convince the public that important changes to its product, especially the introduction of filters, had now solved the nonexistent problem. These two approaches—despite the obvious inconsistencies—went hand in hand. As conditions on the science front deteriorated, the “promise” of “effective” filtration rose in significance. Health concerns created new marketing opportunities.
One indication of how seriously the industry understood its dilemma was the intensive commitment, starting in the early 1950s, to produce new filtered brands or to modify and reposition established ones. At the very time that industry executives gathered in New York in late 1953, their companies were gearing up to produce new brands. Such was the case for Marlboros, which over the next two decades would transform Philip Morris from the smallest of the six major manufacturers to a global behemoth. Marlboro was not a new brand. Since the early 1930s, it had been established as an elite women’s brand with “ivory tips.”88 The transformation of Marlboro from a luxury women’s cigarette to a macho smoke is a testament to the sophistication of the mass marketing and promotion techniques largely invented by the tobacco industry early in the twentieth century. Some would have thought it impossible to so radically remake an existing brand (especially with Marlboro’s effeminate filter), but George Weissman of Philip Morris brought together a diverse team of consultants, public opinion experts, and marketers to manage and manipulate the transition.
In the tobacco trade, package and product were inextricably linked. Weissman soon contracted with Molins, a British company, to produce a new “crush proof” cardboard flip-top box, a radical innovation in cigarette packaging. A new filter was developed with technical assistance from Benson and Hedges, which Philip Morris had recently acquired. But even with its cellulose acetate filter, tar and nicotine levels of the new Marlboro were nearly as high as the earlier unfiltered version.89 The design firm of Fran Gianninoto & Associates, following consultation with color experts, came up with the now legendary red and white packaging. In the long and impressive history of cigarette packaging and design, the new Marlboro package would become the preeminent success of the twentieth century. Few other products have enjoyed such a long-standing design triumph.90
With prototype of product and package in hand, Weissman turned to Leo Burnett to devise an appropriate advertising campaign. Offered the task of reinventing Marlboros to make them the leading filtered cigarette, Burnett explained to the executives at Philip Morris that he sought to give the brand a “personality and a reason for being” that would sustain it in a difficult and competitive market. Burnett, who had fathered the Jolly Green Giant, was based not on Madison Avenue but in Chicago. It was characteristic of his less-is-more approach that the Marlboro campaign was straightforward and avoided the high-pitched claims of typical filter brand ads.
Burnett offered a counterintuitive approach. He argued against promotional themes that emphasized the safety and effectiveness of the filter, noting that “people who have ‘fears’ resent being reminded of these ‘fears.’”91 Marlboro advertising would explicitly avoid discussing filtration. It would not discuss anything. In a major breakthrough, not just for cigarettes but for advertising generally, Burnett’s Marlboro ads would dispense with copy almost entirely
and instead convey message and meaning exclusively through image. The Marlboro campaign would brilliantly navigate the tension between offering reassurance without fracturing denial.
Burnett was especially eager to find a way to displace public perceptions of filters as unmanly. Research conducted for Philip Morris by Elmo Roper, Burnett explained, “shows that many people think of filter cigarettes as a woman’s smoke.” This was a particular vulnerability for Marlboro in view of its lineage. “Our own talks with smokers indicate that many people who know the old ivory-tipped Marlboro regard it as a fancy smoke for dudes and women,” he observed. “This is not the personality we want for the New Marlboro, which must appeal to the mass market.”92 As a result, the original Marlboro campaign, beginning in 1954, featured men’s men (and “the men women like”) as Marlboro smokers. Sea captains, athletes, gunsmiths, and cowboys all appeared in the early ads, all sporting wrist tattoos. 93 It would take nearly a decade before the campaign gelled into its ultimate iconic form. The cowboy took the reins of the Marlboro campaign, displacing the other macho men, in 1962. Pared with the triumphant musical theme from Elmer Bernstein’s Magnificent Seven (whose rights were quickly purchased from United Artists), the new ad literally trumpeted “Marlboro Country.”
For a man’s flavor come to Marlboro Country. My Country. Its big, open, makes a smoker feel ten feet tall. . . . This is my cigarette, Marlboro. It’s like this country, has spirit . . . .
Come to where the flavor is, come to Marlboro Country.94
More than three decades after it was banned from television and radio ads, children of the 1960s can sing the Marlboro jingle on cue.
Burnett’s goal was to tap into certain very basic human desires and fantasies. Reviewing the conceptualization of the campaign, he wrote, “This sounds as though Dr. Freud were on our Plans Board.”95 The Marlboro cowboy suggested a mythic time, not only before the bureaucratization and urbanization of the twentieth century, but a time of simple pleasures, before the mid-century discovery that smoking brought risk and disease. Marlboro Country promised control and autonomy in a world where these were slipping away. What was so remarkable about the brand and its promotion was its precise timing and symbolism. Just as the Marlboro Man had the fortitude to face down the elements, so too would he face down anxiety about the risks of smoking. Rarely, if ever, had marketing so brilliantly combined American values, traditions, and symbols with a promotional message. The campaign created a visual shorthand for the motivation for, and meaning of, smoking in an age of technology, science, risk, and disease. It offered images rich in denial and escapism, in reassurance and immortality. The Marlboro cowboy would find an enduring place at the American campfire.96
Amid its repeated political and promotional victories, the industry did make serious missteps in the sphere of public relations. A prime example was the Tobacco Institute’s 1967 contract with advertising entrepreneur Rosser Reeves. A former head of Ted Bates & Co. notorious for his hard-sell campaigns, Reeves apparently promised a major new effort to “re-establish the smoking and health controversy.”97 Advertising insiders suggested that the campaign would insist that smoking was for informed adults and that the industry strongly opposed smoking among youth.98
In January 1968, True Magazine published an article by Stanley Frank entitled “To Smoke or Not to Smoke—That Is Still the Question.”99 The article recycled the now desiccated scientific critiques—all effectively rebutted—that the industry had been trotting out since the early 1950s. Reeves’s public relations firm, Tiderock Corporation, arranged for more than one million reprints, with some 600,000 to be sent to physicians and other professionals; the piece was also heralded in newspaper ads. All this was done with no attribution to its generous sponsor, the Tobacco Institute, which had contracted with Reeves for $500,000.100 These tactics, of course, were not new. Hill & Knowlton had placed a piece—remarkably similar in its arguments and evidence—in True Magazine in 1954.101 But times had changed, and in 1968, the industry’s reliance on such unscrupulous techniques of journalistic influence drew sustained criticism just as it faced renewed regulatory interest in Congress.
Warren Magnuson, who had sent the piece to Surgeon General William Stewart for review, explained on the floor of the Senate that
it brings into the most serious question the article’s accuracy, impartiality and integrity. . . . These articles . . . are not what they seem to be. And I agree with Dr. Stewart that this is a questionable exercise in high-powered public relations [that] may, if it achieves its apparent objectives, add to the disease and death our population caused by smoking.102
Not only did the exposure of such activities damage the companies in the media and in the political sphere, it pointed to the central dilemma at the heart of industry strategy. Any industry-generated attempts to contest the science would not only seem self-interested, but might make the companies even more vulnerable to litigation and ongoing charges of negligence and fraud.
During the 1950s, Hill & Knowlton stood ready to challenge every new scientific finding implicating tobacco as a cause of disease. Following the surgeon general’s report, however, PR counsel understood that “TIRC had spoken far too much in the past, and this had merely stimulated adverse medical comment.” As the Tobacco Institute replaced the TIRC as the industry’s public relations arm, there was a notable decrease in public efforts to rebut scientific findings. According to some reports, Hill & Knowlton had come to recommend a revision of their original strategy.103 They now understood that straining public credulity would ultimately threaten the industry’s well-being. But the lawyers were now in control, and litigation anxiety powerfully shaped ongoing tobacco strategy.
Certainly, it was a basic premise of public relations theory—since the time of Bernays—that effective PR could shape public opinion in powerful ways. But by the late 1960s, the harms of smoking were no longer a matter of opinion. An astute public relations strategy would need to take account of this reality. To the lawyers in charge, however, such a shift was deemed impossible and risk prone. As Rogers and Todd noted during their 1964 visit, “Hill & Knowlton have been sidetracked; they have little to do and know little of what is going on. They have not seen a President of a company for a long time and are now responsible to the Policy Committee of the Lawyers.”104 New public relations strategies, though often vetted internally, were rejected by the lawyers with phrases like “implied admissions” and “assumed warranties.” With legal concerns trumping public relations, the Hill & Knowlton team began to voice frustration with its marginal status. In April 1968, the company resigned from the Tobacco Institute, ending a nearly fifteen-year run of directing the tobacco industry’s public relations effort. Hill & Knowlton’s departure marked the end of an era in the century of the cigarette. Even as the industry clung to the strategy Hill had devised in 1953, it was losing credibility.
The Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act had not totally cut out the FTC: that agency was tasked with monitoring the effectiveness of labeling and the ongoing impact of advertising and promotion. The FTC’s first assessments in 1967 found the industry’s voluntary code a severe disappointment. Although the companies had promised to ban “any representation with respect to health” in ads promoting filters, the FTC concluded that “whether the filter advertisements . . . constitute representations with respect to health and well-being can best be judged by the following: 44 percent of the public and 57 percent of filter cigarette smokers believe that filters reduce the health risks of smoking.”105 Perhaps more ominously, the FTC found that advertising was still significantly pitched to youth. “Self-regulation by the industry has proved to be ineffectual. Cigarette commercials continue to appeal to youth and continue to blot out any consciousness of the health hazards.”106 As a result, the FTC contended, the notion of informed “choice” was obliterated:To allow the American people, and especially teen-agers, the opportunity to make an informed and deliberate choice of whether or not to start smoking, t
hey must be freed from constant exposure to such one-sided blandishments and told the whole story.107
By 1981, the FTC would conclude that the warning labels then appearing on packages and advertisements had been ineffective. Even when they were read, the warnings left important gaps in knowledge about the risks of smoking. Research had shown, moreover, that fewer than 3 percent of adults “even read the warnings.”108 They concluded that the warnings were “overexposed” and “worn out.”109 The FTC was forced to concede that the warnings it had vigorously sought a decade earlier had significant limitations in communicating the health risks of smoking. Consumer Reports, which typically avoided any taint of partisanship or political advocacy, now saw that the cigarette issue raised unprecedented questions for consumer protection.
In an age when some of the most creative men and women in the country spend their talents devising ingenious ways to make smoking attractive, we must confess a certain pessimism about the countervailing power of sober sentences on the side of the cigarette package or even of “education” conducted on anything less than the scale and style of cigarette advertising itself.110