SMOKELESS TELEVISION COMMERCIALS

BY DAN MILLER
(originally posted January 2, 2006)

It's now been 35 years since that catchy jingle "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should" was burned into our brains on radio and TV.

My daughter Darcy, who's 32, told me she never realized that cigarettes were such a major part of TV advertising.
Of course she didn't.... she wasn't born when the tobacco companies were spending a quarter billion dollars a year on television advertising.

January 2, 1971 was the first day American broadcasters were forbidden by federal law from running cigarette advertising.

Logically, you'd think the ban would have started on January 1st, rather than the 2nd....
But congressional leaders decided to throw a bone to the TV industry and let them have one final, big, lucrative New Year's Day to run cigarette ads during all the bowl games.

For those too young to remember cigarette ads on TV.... their claims were surprising, even in the days before "hazardous to your health" had to be printed on each pack.

I remember ads that would actually feature doctors saying a particular brand of cigarettes was safe, and even beneficial. Astounding!

I found two websites loaded with remarkable facts and pictures about the way cigarettes were marketed in both broadcast and print.
Most of what I'm using in this essay came from these two websites.
Check them out... you'll be amazed.
One is - www.tvparty.com
The other is - www.tobacco.org

The content of many of the cigarette ads in the 1950's was nothing short of mind boggling by today's standards.

When the Old Gold dancing cigarette packs would move across our screens with their lovely legs, the announcer would actually say, "Made by tobacco men, not medicine men."

John Wayne was, for awhile, an on-camera spokesman for Camel Cigarettes.
In 1952, one of his lines was, "Mild and good tasting pack after pack. And I know, I've been smokin' em for twenty years."
Twenty seven years after that commercial aired, John Wayne died of lung cancer.

If you look closely at one of the pictures next to this column, you'll see Fred Flintstone and his wife Wilma pushing Camel Cigarettes, one of that show's early sponsors.

Not to be outdone, Chesterfield used a cartoon character, The Chesterfield King, to promote its king-size cigarettes during the early 1960's. I wonder who these ads were intended for?

A few other (now) unimaginable advertising lines:
In 1952, Kent claimed, "No other cigarette approaches such a degree of health protection and taste satisfaction."
In 1952, Liggett & Myers ran ads on the popular Arthur Godfrey TV and radio show publicizing results of tests run by Arthur D. Little, Inc., showing that "smoking Chesterfields would have no adverse effects on the throat, sinuses or affected organs."

In 1953, L&M touted their cigarettes as, "Just what the doctor ordered."
In 1953, Viceroy claimed it's product gave, "Double barrel health protection."

And if you look closely at the last picture attached here, you'll see a well known American telling everybody why he smoked Chesterfield.

The final cigarette commercial on TV was for Virginia Slims.
It aired in Johnny Carson's Tonight Show at 11:59 p.m. on January 1, 1971, mere seconds before the ban took effect.

And that was that.

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