A vintage Benson & Hedge's ad evokes a cheekier (but no less deadly) era of cigarette marketing

-

Sometimes an ad gets just a little too truthful for its own good. 

By the time this 1972 full-pager for Benson & Hedges 100’s ran in Life magazine, smoking was widely understood to be associated with a range of serious diseases. So, sure, let’s equate using our product to jumping out of a plane. 

Bought by Philip Morris in 1958, Benson & Hedges is a British brand and still a subsidiary of the American conglomerate Philip Morris International. This ad was part of a larger “favorite cigarette break” campaign that leaned into the fact that Benson & Hedges offered longer cigarettes at the same price point, so people kept accidentally snapping the suckers in two. “Nobody had ever mutilated a cigarette before in American advertising—cigarettes, like automobiles, had always been treated with reverent respect by their manufacturers,” Mad Woman Mary Wells Lawrence wrote in her 2002 memoir “A Big Life (In Advertising).” 

“Anything anti-establishment seemed smart in the mid-’60s, so our advertising made Benson & Hedges wildly hip and cool and the cigarette to be seen with.” (Lawrence, the first female CEO listed on the New York Stock Exchange, is still alive at 91. Must not have been a smoker.)

But the times? They are a-changin’. Benson & Hedges parent PMI was in the news last week as merger talks between it and Altria Group, another American purveyor of cancer, broke down. Altria itself holds a minority stake in Juul Labs, the embattled e-cigarette maker that is under scrutiny for its vaping products. Also last week, Kevin Burns, the CEO of Juul Labs, announced that he would be stepping down—only to be replaced by a tobacco executive. Please make sure your seat backs and tray tables are in their full upright position and that your seat belt is fastened.

Juul has been having about as a good a time as our free-falling friend in this ad: At least nine people have died around the country from mysterious vape-related lung illnesses in recent months. Juul had also been under scrutiny for heavily marketing on social media and targeting kids. The company had promised to help wean folks off cigarettes, but came under fire for allegedly containing more nicotine than cigarettes. Last week Juul announced it would stop all marketing in the U.S. 

So smoke ’em if you got ’em, fellas. Just pray there’s a parachute in that knapsack.



from CommaFeed - Real Time Trends Network https://ift.tt/2ox9N6H
via IFTTT

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Takeaways from the outcry over Dior’s Johnny Depp perfume ad: Tuesday Wake-Up Call

-
Welcome to Ad Age’s Wake-Up Call, our daily roundup of advertising, marketing, media and digital news. You can sign up to get an audio version of this briefing on your Alexa device. Dior pulls a perfume ad starring Johnny Depp Yet another luxury brand just had to backtrack after a culturally insensitive move. Dior on Friday pulled an ad for its “Sauvage” perfume, as Business of Fashion reports ; the spot starred Johnny Depp playing guitar in the desert while a Native American dancer, Canku One Star, performed in traditional dress. The company portrayed the spot as “an authentic journey deep into the Native American soul.” But the brand was quickly accused of cultural appropriation. Critics seemed most troubled by the juxtaposition of Native American imagery with the word "Sauvage"—which means “wild” in French, but which also evokes the history of labeling indigenous groups as “savages.”  LVMH-owned Parfums Christian Dior had apparently tried to proceed cautiously. It coo
Read more

When the coronavirus infodemic strikes

-
Image
Social media sites are stepping up their efforts in the war against misinformation… specifically, the coronavirus/COVID-19 infodemic . There’s a seemingly endless stream of potentially dangerous misinformation flying around online related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and that could have fatal results. It’s boomtown in fake-news land riding high on the wave of people being left with their tech devices 24/7. I myself regularly see everything posted online from “hand gel is an immunizer” (nope) and “children can’t be affected” (not true) to “UK rules mean domestic abuse survivors have to stay with their abusive spouse” (absolutely not true at all and hugely dangerous to claim).  We even have engineers being spat on thanks to 5G conspiracy theories potentially resulting in transmission of coronavirus . Turns out a global pandemic is a lightning rod for pushing people to conspiracy theories galore, to the extent that some folks have to go hunting for guides to wean their family members a
Read more

Patch, Or Your Solid State Drives Roll Over And Die

-
Image
Expiration dates for computer drives? That’s what a line of HP solid-state drives are facing as the variable for their uptime counter is running out. When it does, the drive “expires” and, well, no more data storage for you! There are a series of stages in the evolution of a software developer as they master their art, and one of those stages comes in understanding that while they may have a handle on the abstracted world presented by their development environment they perhaps haven’t considered the moments in which the real computer that lives behind it intrudes. Think of the first time you saw an SQL injection attack on a website, for example, or the moment you realised that a variable type is linked to the physical constraints of the number of memory locations it has reserved for it. So people who write software surround themselves with an armoury of things they watch out for as they code, and thus endeavour to produce software less likely to break. Firmly in that arena is the size
Read more