Neman
ENC 1101 – 10
Josh Mehler

The Advertisements That Get You “Hooked”

Every day, customers are exposed to a variety of advertising appeals aimed at influencing the customers’ attitudes towards a wide range of products and services. In the technologically advanced era that we live in, television, radio, telemarketing, magazines, newspapers and billboards are nearly things of the past. Advertising has become as immediate as text messages – in fact, some advertisers are testing and using new methods of advertisement that involve texting consumers’ phones with immediate updates and information on the latest products. The World Wide Web is the single largest vehicle that advertisers have for transporting information of this genre to their consumers. It is also the most effective – the internet combines the visual effectiveness of magazines, newspapers, billboards and television with the audio effectiveness of radio, telemarketing and television while adding a new feature: interactivity with the consumer. Links that take you strait to another web page full of endless, useless bits of information on the product that may have been a single snip of information in an article somewhere or a side-bar pop-up ad on a completely unrelated webpage. Companies of one of the largest ad campaigns in the world make use of all of these advertising methods, and then some!

Cigarettes have been on the American market since 1789, when an advertisement for snuff and tobacco products of P. Lorillard and Company was put in the New York daily paper. The first large cigarette company, created in 1868, was called Bull Durham. Since then, there are over 300 major brands of cigarettes widely available on today’s markets. Winston cigarettes have been on the market since 1954, and from 1966 to 1972 were the world’s best-selling cigarette thanks to their catchy slogan “Winston Tastes Good Like A Cigarette Should!”

The above advertisement was a part of one of the very earliest Winston cigarette advertisement campaigns during which the company claimed that their cigarettes had no additives in their tobacco. This ad in particular stressed the importance of the “No Additives” claim made by the company. During the years when this claim was on their packages and in their ads, Winston cigarette sales went up significantly. At that time, the percent of the population that smoked was approximately half of what it is today, and today smoking population is significantly less than the smoking population in the year 2,000 – a very small amount compared to the numbers of the last decade.  Currently it is estimated that twenty-four percent of men and eighteen percent of women smoke (consuming 100 of more cigarettes per year). However, the problem with this new addition to the campaign was that it falsely conveyed the message that because there were no additives in the tobacco that these cigarettes were safer to smoke.

Winston dealt with flak from many sides, including government organizations like the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission, who were upset that Winston was putting this deceptive claim out to the public. Winston’s claim of “No Additives” did not mean that there were less of the harmful ingredients in the cigarettes. Harmful ingredients such as Arsenic, Butane, Carbon Monoxide, Lead, Copper, Mercury, Chloroform, Methane, Hydrogen Cyanide, etc. still existed in each cigarette.  The company battled with the FTC and the FDA to be able to continue printing this claim on their packages. The FTC settled with Winston, saying that it was alright for them to print it as long as it read “No additives in our tobacco does NOT mean a safer cigarette”. When Winston changed their packaging in July of 2000 the company removed the claim all together from the packages.

Ads like these are extremely misleading to consumers, and today’s ads are no better, however recently (within the past two decades or so) there has been increasingly more and more legislation to help the FDA and FTC control cigarettes and other tobacco products. On June 11^th, 2009, the United States government passed the Tobacco Regulation Bill giving the Food and Drug Administration unprecedented and expansive control over the production, advertising and distribution of cigarettes and other tobacco products. The bill grants the FDA power to control product ingredients, overrule new products, and it also compels tobacco companies to stop using often used and potentially misleading labels on cigarette packages and advertisements like “light” and “mild”. The bill also increases the size of the Surgeon General’s warning on cigarette packs. Since the passage of the bill, cigarette companies like Winston have spent billions upon billions of dollars re-inventing their own advertisement campaigns to meet the standards set by the FDA. The problem though is this: the advertisements are the ONLY things changing. Over the past fifty years, tobacco companies and other cigarette manufacturers have found sneaky ways to successfully sell their products despite the increasingly larger restrictions on advertising. If one thing is for sure, the companies will try again now in the face of this new legislation.

Cigarettes have been around for one hundred and thirty-two years and are still selling strong. The main difference in the advertisements of today versus the advertisements of a few decades ago are that today’s cigarette advertisements are required to have a (small, ineffective) Surgeon General’s warning, although with the passage of this new bill, the FDA will require cigarette companies to increase the size of this warning label to fifty percent of the front and back of the packages, both cartons and individual packs. This warning essentially states that smokers should be aware that health risks come with smoking and that quitting smoking now will greatly reduce the smoker’s chance of a smoking-related illness or death.

Although smokers know of these smoking-related health risks to themselves and others, they continue to smoke, obviously, since these companies are still in business and doing relatively well under the current circumstances of this poor economy. This just proves the effectiveness of the advertisements on consumers. This quote, taken from the introductory paragraph of an article written by Sanjeev Verma in Global Business Review 2009 best explains the intent of advertisers and their ads.
“No communication is complete without feedback or reaction. The intent behind advertising is to persuade consumers to purchase and repurchase the product over and over again, but does the consumer respond to all communications sent by the advertisers? The human brain has a limited processing capacity and consumers have the tendency to process the most useful and appealing information first.”

That appealing information, in this case, is that these cigarettes have no additives and are therefore assumed to be safer to smoke. This is not the case. Also, part of what makes this particular advertisement appealing is the presentation. The advertisement being half black and white and half red and white makes the ad appealing to the eyes. It is catchy, bold, and it gets the message across clearly.

 

The Anti-Advertisement

 

 

This advertisement is the anti-advertisement created in response to the original Winston advertisement at the top of the page.

As you can see, I feel strongly that the original ad falsely conveyed what should have been a simple message to the consumers in a way that made it sound like these cigarettes were safe to smoke. The original ad wasn’t difficult to turn into an anti-ad, so the bold red and white contrasted with the black and white still works for the ad to appeal to consumers. Now the ad takes a new stance: factual and truthful. The well known ‘you might die’ fine print is present in the middle of the page – “…Time is Running Out.” The top of the ad is what Winston was made to put on their cartons as long as they said “no additives”. The bottom of the ad simply reiterates the possibility (as with everything these days…) that smoking can cause cancer faster than you know.

The original advertisement targets the general smoking population. It has no specific age range, and it does not target children. My anti-advertisement targets all of those people with the intent to try and change their minds on the issue of smoking by telling them the truth. The message in the original advertisement is simply that Winston cigarettes have no additives in their tobacco; therefore they are good to smoke, especially in being tasteful.

Cigarette companies (as well as alcohol and other drug companies) are all guilty of false advertising. Many companies advertise to adults and parents through the use of young children. Even worse, some companies advertise to the children themselves, though in a sly secretive sort of way. Cigarette companies have been around for more than a century, and their products are still selling well even with this horrible state of the economy. More and more children are smoking every year, and groups like TRUTH make sure that the public knows the absolute solid evidence of what cigarette smoking does to you and those you love every day, and also to the environment. TRUTH is famous for the amount of teenagers involved in the project (almost entirely teens) and for their own anti-advertisements. More and more people are fighting the fight against cigarettes – there is even a Facebook group for it!

My anti-advertisement shows my stance on smoking and how, clearly, I do not support the way that cigarette companies advertise their products to the public. The advertisements are misleading, and lead people to think that because there are no additives in their tobacco that this means these cigarettes are safe to smoke.