Marlboro has run an insert recently in national magazines that shouts in big red letters, "Party All Night. He's got people near him - he's got friends. "The cowboy's gotten younger, from his 40s to his 20s. Black, a leading tobacco industry analyst with Sanford C. Its strong position evidently secure, Marlboro continues to rely on the Marlboro Man campaign first introduced in the mid-1950s, with myriad variations on a familiar theme of cowboys and mountains.īut there have been subtle changes, says Gary D. As they scramble for market share with splashy new ads, Philip Morris' Marlboro brand continues to dominate, with 33 percent. Winston and Camel, the second and fourth most popular nondiscount cigarettes, together hold less than 12 percent of the market. Novelli characterizes the implicit message of the new Camel ads as: "Light up, we're all going to die anyway." One new Winston ad associates cigarettes with fried food, another target of health advocates. The shift of stance liberates marketers, who now can use the danger of smoking in their pitches. While just a few years ago, industry spokesmen would admit only a "statistical association" between smoking and disease, Leary declared: "It's been known for decades that smoking cigarettes is dangerous." Reynolds' anti-anti-smoking slogans follow a change of strategy last year by top tobacco executives, who for the first time publicly acknowledged that smoking causes deadly illness. "If the question is, are we trying to debunk the serious health risks associated with smoking, the answer is absolutely not." "Winston with its 'No Bull' positioning is rejecting bull wherever it's found," and that includes cigarette taxes, Leary says. One Winston slogan asks: "Why do politicians smoke cigars while taxing cigarettes?" But Ned Leary, the Reynolds vice president in charge of the Winston brand, admits his ads attack proposals to curb teen smoking by heavily taxing cigarettes. Reynolds executives deny that they specifically seek to undercut anti-smoking activists. Bloch, a Rockville physician who heads the tobacco prevention subcommittee of the American Medical Women's Association. "It's not that different from two political campaigns slugging it out," says Dr. With no national tobacco settlement to restrict cigarette advertising, and money from lawsuit settlements and government health budgets flowing into anti-smoking campaigns, some foresee a battle of slogans for the hearts and minds of young people. "They'll always score with something that has fatalism, edge, gallows humor." "It's a lot easier to sell rebellion than to sell nonrebellion," says Bill Novelli, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. The ads' use of humor is tough for opponents of smoking to counter. "May Contain Pop Mythology," says another, and the symbol on the cigarette pack is labeled: "Camel's head on pack rendered from 'classified' photo of alien." "Viewer Discretion Advised: Subliminal Imagery," says one ad. Other new Camel ads indirectly ridicule the anti-tobacco activists' earlier attacks on Reynolds' "Joe Camel" campaign, which Reynolds dropped last year after a decade of complaints that the cartoon camel appealed to children and contained sexual imagery. Angry accusations from anti-smoking forces about the ads' nefarious purposes, however, may be just the reaction Reynolds marketers are hoping for.
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