How are tobacco products advertised?

The “Joe Camel” Campaign

Of all the advertising campaigns launched by the tobacco industry, R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company’s marketing for Camel brand cigarettes was by far the most notorious and controversial. In 1988, in an attempt to create “replacement smokers” for those long-term smokers who were sick and dying, R. J. Reynolds introduced the enormously popular and youth “friendly” animated character Joe Camel. An engaging, wisecracking, and easygoing character, “Old Joe” was an instant success among young people. Few people realize that R. J. Reynolds’s Joe Camel was a nod to the Durham bull, a similarly popular anthropomorphic character at the turn of the twentieth century. The Durham bull advertised roll-your-own cigarettes by rebelliously kicking up its heels and making humorous remarks.

Through R. J. Reynolds’s marketing campaign, Joe Camel was popularized on billboards and in magazines and newspapers, which became saturated with the Joe Camel image. The character was selling not only Camel cigarettes but also a huge amount of Joe Camel paraphernalia—everything from T-shirts, to baseball caps, to underwear.

In 1991, the American Medical Association sparked debate when it published a study revealing that 90 percent of six-year-old children who were surveyed could recognize and identify Joe Camel, roughly the same percentage who could recognize and identify Mickey Mouse. By contrast, only 67 percent of adults surveyed could identify Joe Camel and directly associate the character with cigarettes.

After filing a lawsuit against R. J. Reynolds for deceptive advertising practices and liability, a San Francisco law firm later revealed an astronomical spike of several hundred percent in revenue from youth market shares between 1988 and 1992 that was specifically attributable to the Joe Camel advertising campaign. In 1997, following public outcry and after the US Congress threatened stricter legislation, R. J. Reynolds settled the lawsuit, agreeing to terminate Joe Camel-related advertisements and agreeing to pay the State of California $10 million to fund antismoking education for youth.

Shortly thereafter, R. J. Reynolds changed its ad campaign by replacing Joe Camel the cartoon character with an image of a true camel, an image that was designed to appeal to adults and an image that still represents Camel cigarettes.

In the end, though, it was the phenomenal success of the Joe Camel advertising campaign that did more than anything else to incense and inflame the public. The ad campaign encouraged public, school, and legislative support for subsequent antismoking campaigns around the United States.

Legislating Deceptive Tobacco Advertising

In 1900, only one in 100 Americans smoked, but that percentage soon rose. During World War I, smoking became immensely popular in both the United States and in Europe, in part because the US military distributed free branded cigarettes to its troops. By the 1930s, the Federal Trade Commission began regulating the false advertising claims made by tobacco companies. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it had been commonplace for tobacco products to be advertised by doctors and surgeons, who claimed that smoking had all-around health benefits.

Beginning in 1920, tobacco brands, especially Lucky Strike, began advertising campaigns that targeted women, appealing to American women’s newfound status as “liberated” voters after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution (1920). The ads promised women that smoking would make them more slender, trim, and attractive, a claim repeated fifty years later with the branding of Virginia Slims cigarettes.

The 1930s witnessed en masse the first detrimental fallout of smoking’s ever-growing popularity, as doctors began treating huge numbers of patients for lung cancer, a disease otherwise rarely seen. Increasing numbers of medical reports and studies worldwide began to draw direct correlations between the upsurge in smokers and the spike in certain kinds of cancer.

Smoking was further popularized during World War II, when free cigarettes were provided to the troops, as they were during World War I. Also, tobacco companies continued to deny medical reports, and their ads continued to portray smoking as healthy. Hollywood similarly intensified the glamorous appeal of smoking in its films. Consequently, by 1950, approximately 50 percent of American adults smoked cigarettes.

After more than a decade of continued research that further linked smoking and cancer, the US Office of the Surgeon General (in 1964) proclaimed smoking to be hazardous to one’s health and to be a direct cause of lung cancer. In 1965, Congress passed the Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act, which required cigarette manufacturers to place a warning label on each pack of cigarettes. The first label warned consumers that cigarette smoking “might” be hazardous to their health; in 1969, Congress passed additional legislation, the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act, which required the warning label on cigarettes packs to be more definitive: “Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health.” The act also banned all advertising for cigarettes on television and radio.

Big Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, scientific studies continued to confirm the harm of tobacco products, yet the tobacco industry continued to deny this fact in its advertising. By the 1990s, with escalating numbers of lawsuits against the tobacco industry for fraudulent misrepresentation, wrongful death, criminal negligence, and criminal liability, an increasing number of cases were decided in favor of injured and, oftentimes, deceased smokers. Moreover, as enormous amounts of taxpayer dollars were being used to treat sick and dying smokers, state attorneys general began to sue tobacco companies to recoup lost revenue from state budgets. As juries awarded plaintiffs ever larger settlements, the tobacco industry began to search for a way to stop the increasing litigation.

Finally, in 1998, R. J. Reynolds, Brown and Williamson, and Philip Morris (three major entities of what came to be called Big Tobacco) were bound to the Master Settlement Agreement (MSA), the largest financial settlement in US history. In addition to severely restricting tobacco advertising, the MSA mandated annual Big Tobacco payments of millions of dollars to state governments for ongoing governmental efforts to control tobacco use, especially among youths. The MSA also led to widespread antismoking advertising campaigns, such as the Truth campaign, which encouraged youth to stop or avoid smoking.

The MSA also made illegal all advertising and selling of tobacco products to any person younger than age eighteen and made it illegal to use any cartoon or animation to advertise tobacco products. This provision would ensure against the recurrence of any marketing campaign reminiscent of the Joe Camel campaign that had targeted children in earlier decades. The MSA additionally placed Big Tobacco advertising under the regulation and control of the US Food and Drug Administration, a provision later reinforced with congressional legislation.

E-cigarettes, which deliver nicotine by vaporizing a liquid solution containing it, are not covered by the laws restricting tobacco advertising, and the age restrictions also do not apply. The debate about advertising nicotine products to young people has therefore continued into the 2010s, with a 2015 study finding that adolescents age thirteen to seventeen were more likely to express an intention to try e-cigarettes after exposure to e-cigarette advertising. Another study, from the University of Pennsylvania, found that e-cigarette advertising was also likely to make smokers and former smokers crave tobacco.

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