Cigarettes under fire: blowing away the PR smoke screen.

I though inseparable from the act of smokking, cigarette smoke is lone substance that is hardly ever seen in ads for cigarettes. Evidently its haze would obscure the illusion of youth and vigor advertisers attempt to project with health models and pure and pristine environments.

In a way that's ironic, because the "PR smoke screen" the industry has been producing for decades has been highly effective in camouflaging the pernicious nature of its activities.

Smoke screens. "Tobacco industry says it wants to halt kids' smoke," say headlines reporting public relations from the Tobacco Institute. Don't believe it. No matter how privileged or persuasive, this cigarette smoke screen is totally contradicted by facts emerging from archives and trials. The facts show that cigarette firms research the starting process and preferences of kids as young as 15 extensively, design ads to appeal to their emotional needs, and are well aware of teen nicotine addiction.

For every dollar spent on PR activities denying an interest in kids, many hundreds more will advertise cigarettes and recruit starters.

Since smoking dropouts from quitting--and dying--are high, continued success depends on a steady flow of recruits. The industry is dominated by the companies who recruit the most new, young smokers. "Young smokers represent the major opportunity group for the cigarette industry," said Canada's Imperial Tobacco Limited. A marketing executive quoted by the FTC said: "Market expansion in this industry means two things--kids and women. I think that governs the thinking of all the companies ."

Much research and marketing effort is aimed at teenagers beginning at age 15. Memos about industry plans bear titles like "Youth Target Study" or "Project 16." Hidden camera interviews and surveys gather data on demographics (e.g., age, sex, family size), lifestyle (taste in music, clothes, movies, hobbies, etc.), health (knowledge, rationalizations, and concerns), and personality. The psychological research is highly sophisticated, measuring factors like ego strength, submissiveness, shrewdness, tendency toward guilty feelings, and self-discipline.

Molding the image. One of the purposes of cigarette advertising is to shape how others perceive the nicotine user, and his or her own social and self-image. Advertisers know that peer group pressure is an important factor in kids' decision-making. Thus they work consciously to use ads to shape group, as well as individual, perceptions.

According to corporate studies, adolescents' urge to display symbols of their desired independence can be turned into a motivation for smoking. Ads for Marlboro fit this model, since the cowboy is self-sufficient with no boss (parent/teacher). Selling a drug like nicotine--documented by the surgeon general as addictive as well as lethal--as a symbol of independence is ironic and tragically deceptive.

Many studies have shown that media that carry cigarette ads do a poor job with the health story. Editors are naturally reluctant to bite the hands that feed them, and the cigarette firms don't hesitate to use their clout if necessary. The world's largest ad agency, Saatchi & Saatchi, offended R.J. Reynolds Nabisco by writing an ad for Northwest Airlines announcing a nosmoking policy. The ad agency lost $84 million of business not from cigarettes, but from Nabisco Brands, owned by R JR. Cigarette firms also own all brands made by Kraft, Miller, and General Foods, keeping them among the top 10 advertisers, even on TV.

Promotional spending by U.S. cigarette manufacturers has more than tripled in the two decades since cigarette ads were banned on American radio and television--perhaps the clearest evidence of advertising's importance to these corporations. Instead of adding their TV advertising budgets to their profits, they chose to invest instead in free sample distribution, billboards, magazine ads, and sport and concert promotion.

Understimating the risks. The addictiveness and health risks of smoking are underestimated by even the well educated, thanks to advertising and the relative lack of media exposure to the medical catastrophe represented by lung cancer and other smoking-related illnesses. About 90 percent of today's college students, for example, underestimate the risks of smoking. Corporate research finds that starters "almost universally assume these risks will not apply to themselves because they will not become addicted." RJR found that "however intriguing smoking was at 11, 12, or 13, by the age of 16 or 17 many regretted their use of cigarettes for health reasons and because they felt unable to stop smoking when they wanted to." Other research documents discuss how teens become "slaves to their cigarettes."

Firms also know that warnings are little noticed by kids and, if and when seen, go unheeded. But it's ironic that the 1964 U.S. law requiring warning labels on cigarette packages is seen as a triumph for consumer advocates.

Of the 15 proposals considered by Congress at the time, only the industry-sponsored bill passed. Even Advertising Age called the legislation that finally emerged--a version of the industry-sponsored proposal-- "a shocking piece of special interest legislation." It weakened the warning wording, let the industry decide placement and type, did not apply to ads until the next decade (1972), handcuffed the FTC's regulatory powers for many years, and blocked cities or states from passing more stringent laws.

Despite congressional intentions, the warning formula that finally merged from the legislative process is far from effective. The placement and printing of warnings on tobacco packages and ads minimizes the attention they get. Research shows that the warnings are rarely noticed and poorly recalled. Recent changes require a rotation of four different warnings and less ambiguous language, but even these are all but illegible in billboards or transit ads, and are totally absent in sponsored sports events, like Virginia Slims-sponsored tennis. They actually do have one unintended effect--helping firms avoid lawsuits, because they can tell courts and grieving families that smokers were warned.

Not all are aimed at kids, of course. Women have been targeted since the 1920s, when Marlboros were called "mild as May" in an attempt to position them as a product for the growing women's market. Public relations photos from that era identified women smoking in public as lighting a "torch of liberty." As in many modern ads, some brands were portrayed as symbols of fashionable slimness. Virginia Slims tells today's woman, "You've come a long way, baby!" But in truth things have changed very little. Women, like men, are sold addiction and death by ads positioning cigarettes as symbols of freedom and style. Blacks too have long been targeted, but were years late in being offered filtered products as an appeal to safety concerns.

Now ads from Philip Morris Companies, Inc., feature endorsements from prominent African Americans for "free speech" ads. The company poses as a defender of freedom and liberty, while in reality protecting its record profits as a promoter of nicotine addiction.

A leaky pail. Frequent industry claims that cigarette advertising is merely intended to promote brand switching also don't stand up to analysis. Switchers are a small and unattractive market segment. Only about 10 percent or less of smokers are switchers in any given year, and these are mostly fickle "pre-quitters." Corporate documents identify efforts aimed at switchers as third on their priority list, behind advertising designed to attract new starters and reassure existing smokers.

Ads aimed at health Concerns. Ads aimed at smokers concerned about health risks, a vast majority of adult smokers, appeal to their fears, offering reassurances about health and safety. The majority show pure, pristine environments with healthy, robust smokers fit for athletic challenges because "positive lifestyles... effect the continued social acceptability of smoking." Most ads for filtered products imply relative safety, an idea sometimes ludicrously false. Kent filters were initially made from asbestos, trade-named Micronite. The 1954 ads implied an American Medical Association endorsement that the AMA called "outrageous hucksterism." The tar and nicotine levels for filtered Pall Mall, Chesterfield, and Lucky Strikes were once higher, not lower, than the unfiltered versions of the very same brands.

Cigarette firms complain that they are heavily regulated. In truth, they need not comply with the Consumer Products Safety Commission, the Controlled Substances Act, the Federal Hazardous Substances Act, the Food and Drug Administration, or the Toxic Substances Act. Only the Federal Trade Commission has had periodic and limited authority over the years, and it has been frustrated, defeated, and handcuffed. Well-meaning congressional initiatives over the years rarely get out of committee, or survive the lobbying counterattack.

Other countries are taking far more substantial initiatives to control the ads and other promotional inducements to smoke. Partial or nearly total bans of cigarette promotion already exist or are now before legislatures in Canada, New Zealand, Norway, and the entire European Common Market, to name a few.

Ad bans. Ad bans work, because advertising works. As long as advertising continues to be part of tobacco industry policy, they should be a necessary part of public policy, if only because of the message of warning they send. Unfortunately, many American residents, especially smokers, think that the U.S. would ban cigarette ads if smoking were highly hazardous, and that the lack of a ban implies that the product's hazards are not all that great. This faith in the U.S. government is sadly misplaced to date.

Unlike other products, cigarettes are deadly when used exactly as intended. The advertising images, and their intended meanings, are inherently false. Media needs to develop a sense of responsibility for disseminating them. Western society needs to reexamine the commercial ethos that made them possible for so many decades--and is still keeping them going in the United States.

Richard W. Pollay is a teaching and research professor at the business school of the University of British Columbia and curator of its History of Advertising Archives.

Excerpted from the Spring/Summer 1991 issue of Media & Values magazine: "Fatal Attraction: The Selling of Addiction," published by the Center for Media and Values, Los Angeles. Used by permission.

EPA Affirms Passive Smoke as Cancer Risk

Science advisers to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently approved a report concluding that secondhand tobacco smoke is a cause of cancer in humans and of serious respiratory problems in infants and young children.

The EPA adopted the strongly worded report, which states that environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) should be added to a select list of the most toxic substances, including asbestos, known to cause cancer in humans. The report estimates that 3,000 lung cancer deaths can be attributed to ETS each year, as well as 300,000 lower respiratory tract infections among children.

The EPA put its stamp of approval on this historic report after two years of revisions and intense debate.

Although the tobacco industry downplayed the significance of the report, insisting it was based on poor science, antismoking advocates predict it will accelerate tobacco regulation at every level of the government and across the private sector, and surface in key lawsuits against the industry.