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Re: Life Imitates Art

Upon reading the paper by Biener (Tobacco Control, June 2002), I couldn't help but be struck by the similarity between the reported effects of the Philip Morris anti-smoking campaign and the fictional campaign in Christopher Buckley's (1994) satirical novel "Thank You for Smoking."

In the fictional version, Nick Naylor, chief spokesperson for the Academy of Tobacco Studies (a.k.a. the tobacco industry), announces a $5 million industry-funded campaign designed to keep underage kids from smoking. The advertising creatives, despite being a little concerned at being asked to produce "an ineffective message that will have no impact on the people it is targeted at," come up with a new campaign titled "Everything Your Parents Told You About Smoking Is Right." The great strength of the campaign in Naylor's view is that "It is dull." In the agency's words "Kids are going to look at this and go, 'Puuke'."

In the factual version, Philip Morris spends a large amount of money developing and running a campaign titled "Think, Don't Smoke," which "featured an off camera adult asking teenagers…whether or not they smoked. The teens interviewed were all non-smokers who answered the interviewer by saying that they didn't need to smoke to be cool" (Biener, p.44). Not surprisingly, the study found that the Philip Morris ads are rated by the target audience (underage kids) as less effective than any of the other anti-smoking ads they recalled seeing.

You may wonder why it is that a company like Philip Morris, with many years of advertising experience, could develop such a spectacularly ineffective ad campaign. This is the same Philip Morris who won first place among Ad Age's Top 100 Ad Icons for the Marlboro Man: "The most powerful - and in some quarters, most hated - brand image of the century, the Marlboro Man stands worldwide as the ultimate American cowboy and masculine trademark, helping establish Marlboro as the best-selling cigarette in the world" (Ad Age, 2001).

You may wonder, indeed, unless you've read Buckley's book.