The Tobacco Harvest

In the 1980’s, so successful is cigarette advertising to women in Britain that despite acknowledged health-risk factors, smoking among women has dropped by only a fifth in the past 15 years, compared with a drop of one third for men.a As a result, “lung cancer is now killing nearly as many women as breast cancer, and more and more women are suffering from ‘male’ diseases of the heart and chest,” reports London’s The Sunday Times.

Britain’s Health Education Council is greatly concerned, but what can it do on an advertising budget of £1.5 million compared with the tobacco industry’s £100 million?

But in Britain, where cigarette manufacturers trade in a “struggling market,” the hard sell continues in printed form, particularly in women’s magazines. Why there? Simply because “women form an extremely lucrative source of income,” observes The Sunday Times. When an advertiser is employed to sell a commodity, morality does not necessarily come into it.

Advertising’s Use of Sports

It is logical for manufacturers to sponsor sports with which they are connected​—tires and petrol in motor racing, for instance. But how do tobacco companies get involved in such promotions, to the tune of £8.2 million in Britain in 1985? “Sport is supposed to make people healthy and smoking makes them ill,” observed one Member of Parliament, “so tobacco sponsorship is irreconcilable with the idea of promoting healthy living through sport.” Yet such promotions are profitable investments. Consider why.

First of all, there is the immediate association of a sporting event with an advertised brand name, but that is only the beginning. By means of large signs, skillfully put around the place where the events are being televised, cigarette advertisements can appear on millions of television screens, and the tobacco companies are not paying a penny for the privilege. In this way they also circumvent the 20-year-old ban placed on all television tobacco advertising in the United Kingdom.

In 1982 an estimated 350 million viewers in 90 countries saw Martina Navratilova win the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Championship wearing an outfit of the same colors as a popular cigarette packet. “It’s got nothing to do with cigarettes. Who’s worrying anyway?” was the response of one of the promoters, in the face of BBC Television protests. More stringent restrictions have been imposed to meet this kind of sporting challenge, but it is not easy to keep ahead of such subtle persuasion.