Plan B Forum

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnKLpO9qhOE&t=3s

One of my favorite responses to commercials of this type was Phillip Morris, which stated it was made by real "tobacco men" not medicine men. I recall a number o TV commercials along this line.

Now they're the butt of all of the jokes about cigarette commercials.

One of my favorites was a commercial aired at the conclusion of Flintstones episodes where Fred had Wilma bring him is Winston cigarettes and he sat there smoking while he extolled its taste. I had actually forgotten it (cigarette commercials were not uncommon at the time, even with shows aimed at kids/families, so it was not really notable) until I saw it in a cigarette documentary a while back.

This process really puzzled me. Advertising promoting nicotine and ethanol consumption in certain forms was banned from tv. Their sales went up. Why did not rational business managers conclude that tv advertising was not a good investment?

snailgate

I worked at a package store as a teenager in the 80s - we were regularly visited by tobacco company representatives just like doctors offices are visited by pharmaceutical representatives pushing drugs. The tobacco representatives brought all kinds of cool ‘merch’ that smokers could ‘win’ by buying so many packs or cartons - the more ciggies you buy, the better the merch. Most of the merch was geared toward the youth market, which coincidentally is how you grow sales year after year - by marketing aggressively to new smokers and getting them addicted. More potential new smokers are born every day after all.

This kind of aggressive marketing was done away with in the class action litigation of the states against the tobacco companies. Their sales in the USA have been falling for years now but that’s okay they are focusing on poisoning the citizens of other countries without protections against their manipulative sales tactics.