Cigarette ads on TV

I've been away from this blog for a while, but this week a topic that fits my memory perfectly came to mind. Next April will be the 50th anniversary of Nixon signing the law that banned cigarette ads from TV. It went into effect on January 2, 1971, which gave the tobacco companies one last push on the college bowl games played on January 1, which back then was the biggest day for college football, bar none.

 Of course, print ads were still legal and still are to this day, but even they must have a readable box of a legally defined size that presents a clear message about the dangers of tobacco. If we look at this from the point of view of the tobacco companies, their free speech was severely curtailed, but I haven't heard even the strident free speech advocate take up their case.

The United States is a major producer of tobacco, but in terms of tobacco producing states, there's North Carolina and there's everybody else.

As this graph shows, North Carolina is dominant in tobacco production. Their numbers are more than the next four states combined. In this era of free flowing money, an industry as big as tobacco could easily have the entire GOP on their side as well as moderate Democrats, but in 1970, the industry was steamrolled by a bipartisan wave of disapproval of tobacco. This is one of those bills that Nixon signed that no Republican that followed him would have approved. I do not come to praise Nixon, except to say he was pragmatic. The Democrats had an advantage and he decided not to fight every battle to the last breath. His Southern Strategy had many parts, but on this he couldn't save the mostly Southern industry. There was never serious talk of banning cigarettes; the experience of Prohibition was still clear in people's minds. but the American Cancer Society started running their public service commercials and it made a difference in public opinion. Conventional wisdom, usually so hidebound, decided that Something Must Be Done, and the choice was the TV ad ban.

This may be the most famous ACS ad, narrated by Gene Wilder, first aired in 1969.

I remember a lot of the ads, and the jingles stick with me the most, as I expect they do for most people.

Benson & Hedges decided to measure cigarettes in millimeters, marketing Benson & Hedges 100s, longer than other cigarettes. It was a successful ploy and some Clever Trevor decided to literally one up them and make a cigarette called the 101s. This odd ad ends with the jingle, the music clearly stolen from La Bamba. The tagline reminded me of Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap and his amplifier that goes to 11.

Another jingle still fresh in my mind fifty years later is the one from Virginia Slims.

The tobacco industry has always marketed their product to the young, though they deny it at every instance. Here's an ad built into an episode of The Flintstones from the first season. I have never believed their denials since.

Marlboro had started their ad campaign connecting their brand with manliness in the 1950s, but their big breakthrough was buying the Elmer Bernstein's theme from The Magnificent Seven. They did many variations on the section best known for the rhythm carried by the horn section and the melody up in the strings. It redefined what cowboy music was supposed to sound like and Marlboro changed their ad campaign accordingly, not just manly men doing manly things but cowboys out in the West.

I'm not sure its fair to call this a jingle since there are no lyrics. I loved the song so much and hated the product equally fiercely, and it formed an itch in me to mock it, so I thought like a MAD magazine writer and came up with some lyrics.

Marlb'ro... Marlb'ro country.
Home of... the brave cowboy.
Somewhere under the Western sky,
People are dying there of cancer.

For people under fifty years old, there experience of TV ads for cigarettes is confined mainly to watching YouTube, but the tobacco industry did make an attempt by marketing small cigars, saying they were a different product than cigarettes. This ruse didn't last long, but it did give us an ad in the 1970s featuring a very young Fred Willard selling Tiparillos.

I can't even estimate how many TV ads I saw as a kid, I would expect most Boomers have a similar experience. Like the draft, this is one of those things from the 1960s that never was much of an experience for people about ten years younger than I am.