As smoking became more reviled, so tobacco campaigns were forced to become ever more creative. With the end of the cigarette ad, Peter York looks back on a golden age of advertising
You could just argue that British cigarette advertising - the best of it - gave us Young British Artists. The linking theme, as ever, is Charles Saatchi. He was an important young star in the first all-British "creative" advertising agency, Collett Dickinson Pearce, which gave us the epic Benson & Hedges adverts. He went on to co-found the second, Saatchi & Saatchi, which had the Silk Cut account (and, in his new incarnation as M&C Saatchi, kept it until 14 February this year when the ban on all UK cigarette advertising - the Ecclestone Formula One arrangement aside - was finally enforced). And, as British contemporary art's biggest patron, he gave us YBAs.
Advertising has always been a huge unrecognised source of outdoor relief for the arts. For a TV debate on arts funding a few years back, I worked through some pretty broad-brush calculations which suggested that it stumped up as much again as all the public-sector subsidies put together. All this came at a price - particularly in the case of tobacco. Cigarette advertising, a huge media spender in its golden age (equivalent to several hundred million pounds a year at current prices), was at its height when Britain became the lung cancer capital of Europe.
Before health worries surfaced as public concern and organised lobbies - Ash (Action on Smoking and Health) was founded in 1971 - tobacco advertising was a massive and uncontroversial category in a poorer world. FMCGs (fast-moving consumer goods), little things in tins and packets, dominated media advertising then. Advertising was used in all the familiar ways to invest cigarette brands with memorable claims and personalities. In the 1940s, cigarettes would be shown in classy situations, endorsed by celebrities - real A-list Hollywood stars in America - the ads would make claims about tobacco quality or manufacturing science and, bizarrely, some brands had what almost amounted to health claims.
A magazine ad for Camel cigarettes in 1946 claimed: "More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette." The company had asked "113,597 doctors from coast to coast". The picture even showed a GP's consulting room, with a five-year-old girl in pigtails telling the family doctor: "I'm going to grow to 100 years old." As you look at this glorious period kitsch, from the 1940s through to the 1970s (it subsidised great chunks of the media, high and low), you keep wondering: when did they know?
Cigarette advertising was banned from British television in 1965 but unrestricted in other media. A voluntary agreement followed in 1971 which defined the rules of engagement for advertisers. After that came a war of attrition, first with David Owen and later with Sir George Young in the 1980s, as government activists tried to restrict and eventually remove tobacco advertising. (Peter Taylor describes how the industry fought back, using their Tory contacts and constituency MPs fearful of job losses, in his brilliant Smoke Ring: the politics of tobacco.)
By the late 1970s, restrictions on the classic advertising ploys - associations with high status, sexual attractiveness, celebrities, the young, authority and all the old building blocks of a brand personality - were really starting to bite. Cigarette advertising, in print and on posters, had to box much cleverer. The golden age of British cigarette advertising is really about just two brands - Benson & Hedges and Silk Cut, owned by one company, Gallaher Group plc - and their leap into the surreal.
The B&H press advertising drew on the visual tricks of surrealism to exploit the glamour of B&H's gold box. With no people and no copy, they showed the packs as cheese outside a mouse hole, flying ducks up a wall, in the shape of a Stonehenge block or a pyramid. A cinema commercial, directed by Hugh Hudson, showed a giant B&H packet swinging from a helicopter above the Arizona desert, watched by bug-eyed iguanas and then dropped into a swimming pool. I can still hear the whirlybird motor, still see the shadow on the desert. It was, they said, the most expensive cinema commercial ever produced. And almost certainly the best-remembered.
The Silk Cut campaign, launched in 1983, took surrealism on several notches. It didn't feature packs, just the purple of the brand livery. The first ad showed a pool of purple silk gathered in a dreamy haphazard way - and cut with a significant slit. By the standards of early 1980s advertising, this was what marketing people loved to call dark or "edgy".
It featured vicious cutting instruments and frail silk, it had images that evoked Psycho and the can-can (open scissors as dancers, speared through more purple silk, iron legs aloft on a stage). You could read a lot into the campaign. It was about women, their organs and violation. It was about sex and death - Eros and Thanatos - according to a Scottish academic, Alastair McIntosh, who devoted a 30-page monograph to the spiritual, surreal and Jungian themes in B&H and Silk Cut advertising.
Actually, both campaigns were just beautifully produced entertainments, devised by creatives who picked up ideas promiscuously through grazing; flicking through the pages of art books, responding to popular media and, mostly untroubled by doubt or analysis, having fun. And both campaigns confirmed the audience's cleverness and visual literacy in recognising the elegance of the jokes. Clever advertising driven by puns on intrinsic properties - the box, the brand name - made for clever, memorable brands; brands with an assurance that made the older cigarette advertising approaches look decidedly klutzy.
Remember Rothmans and its pilots' braided uniforms; Peter Stuyvesant and its "International" claims; Players and its 1960s "sharing" commercials. And a raft of below-stairs brands which sold on quips and coupons and money-off (Regal and Royals and Players No 6)?
But smart advertising made B&H aspirational - a sort of proto Club Class cigarette - and positioned Silk Cut as the intelligent middle-class brand for a decade. They were pioneers of the designer 1980s and widely imitated.
Cigarette advertising is an absolute "Golden Treasury" of period fun. But Peter Taylor quotes Michael Pertschuk, chairman of the US Federal Trade Commission in the late 1970s, looking back on the battle for restriction. "So when we reflect longingly on the 'high consumerism' of the 1960s, nostalgia is freighted by the knowledge that during that very period, no government action was taken that seriously threatened the short-term market or profitability of the most lethal consumer product ever openly sold in this country." Clever lobbying was half the battle, but the warm, disarming glow of advertising creativity probably helped.
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