The Rise and everlasting effects of Cigarette Advertisments.
All types of products are advertised these days from makeup to food to appliances. Advertisements of these products don’t really bother me , it’s the advertisement of potentially fatal products cigarettes. Cigarette ads have been the most hypocritical ads ever to be made.The ads advertise healthy beautiful people rejoicing as they smoke a cigarette. but they do not show the real cigarette smokers, the ones with emphysema, holes in their throats, or cancer patients. Cigarette advertisement is practically invisible today, but in the 1920s-1940s you could see ads everywhere including television, newspapers and billboards.http(://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/reg20n3d.html) The way cigarette companies at that time concealed the deadly effects of cigarettes was by using Hollywood to glamorize it. For example(http://www.chickenhead.com/truth/chesterfield6.html), the movie star here is smoking a cigarette while she is laughing and smiling, in the happiest mood that one could think of. and if you read the lines used to explain the taste of “Chesterfield” cigarettes it says”“Firm and pleasing to the lips… mild yet deeply satisfying to the taste – Chesterfield alone is pleasure packed by Accu-Ray.” This is a complete fabrication of what cigarettes really are! First off they taste AWFUL, but cigarette advertisers won’t tell the consumer that and scare them off. especially someone that has never smoked a cigarette. How would they know if it tasted bad? and think about it, most of the people that are addicted to cigarettes started smoking in their early adolescent years, most people at that age believed a lot of what the media told them.
By the 1950s cigarette ads were banned from being on t.v. and are minimally advertised through newspapers and magazines. Now in 2007, you might think of how is smoking still popular with no major advertisements since half a century ago. the answer is because the media didn’t only use t.v., newspapers, and billboards to advertise but it used people. People that became committed smokers and turned the other cheek to the reality of the health effects of cigarette smoking. Everyday people like our family members and peers are now advertising cigarette smoking and they don’t even know it. Of course they are not purposely trying to get us to be smokers too but it is still exposure to it. I remember i was first exposed to smoking was when i was five years old. My two older brothers smoked and continued to smoke for 6 years . I’d watch them smoke pack after pack. I remember i asked my brothers how did they first start smoking and they said that they seen our uncle. and our uncle started smoking when he seen a marlboro ad. My uncle was influenced by a cigarette ad, and my brothers were influenced by our uncle. It is an intertwined web between advertisers and the consumers, but it ultimately rides on the exposure first received from cigarette advertisers.
Yasmin Saleh
Interesting, Yasmin. So, cigarettes do not need formal advertising because A) they are addictive and B) they are available to buy. So all it takes is for cigarettes to appeal to someone and they are hooked. So…my question is should we limit advertisting for cigarettes all together? Or should we make smoking illegal?
Well to my understanding when I read a few articles is that cigarette advertising has already been limited, because now ad companies can’t run adv. for cigarettes on television. and i rarely see cigarette ads in any newspapers or magazines so i guess it has been cut down significantly in the past 50 years. because back in the 1920s cigarette ads were posted in very public places for any one and any age to see it. but now we have like non smoking areas for certain people and a smoking area in restaurants.
We could make cigarettes illegal. i mean it is just as bad as marijuana if not worse. but i think the outcome would be the same as the prohibition act of 1920 where alcohol was prohibited but people, like the infamous Al Capone, still got alcohol illegally and the people selling that alcohol became rich, then pretty soon alcohol became legal again in 1933 because the government would rather have some money from alcohol sales than a group of gangsters. The problem with making it illegal is that it would be impossible to enforce the law just as it was impossible to enforce the prohibition act.
Yasmin Saleh
I wrote about this topic also, Why not ban cigaretts, all together. So what if there was someone like al capone, Weed is illegal and many still do it, SOME study’s show that weed is less dangerous than cigarettes http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-05/ats-sfn051706.php …. i dont really care if your a smoker or not, this is about advertising and even though people say ads are cut down because its illegal to ad on the tv the fact is that …
“The 1998 legal settlement between the states and the tobacco companies prohibited the tobacco companies from taking “any action, directly or indirectly, to target youth… in the advertising, promotion or marketing of tobacco products.” However, since the settlement, the tobacco companies have increased their cigarette marketing expenditures by 125 percent to a record $15.1 billion a year, or $41.5 million a day, according to the Federal Trade Commission. Much of this marketing is still targeted at kids.
thats after TV ads were a no no…. but they find other ways to advertise, I mean its there Business. TAKE THIS INTO CONSIDERATION … Say if you made a product and 50 years later you learn it kills, what would you do????
Dennis Comment # 1
Good comments, guys.