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Dialogues@RU is published
annually
by the
Writing Program at
Rutgers, The State
University of New Jersey
Volume 4
Fall 2005
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: Advertising and the Tobacco Industry - Page 1
By Monica Yung
Since the seeds of American cigarettes were first sown in 1884, the tobacco industry has established a resilient root that continues to nestle deeper into the soil of society, making smoking cigarettes an integral and pervasive activity that has been inhaled into the American way of life. Even today, smoking is a defining element in American culture, a rite of passage into adulthood for many adolescents. For more than half a century, the world's tobacco companies were thought to be providing a great public service. In The Smoke Ring: Tobacco, Money, and Multinational Politics , Peter Taylor reveals that during World War I, General John J. Pershing cabled Washington DC, asserting the indispensability of tobacco as a daily ration, and during World War II, President Roosevelt made tobacco a protected crop as part of the war effort (5). However, by the mid-twentieth century, smoking began to be correlated with cancer and other debilitating ailments, prompting many to oppose the addictive and ubiquitous habit. Although time has only continued to reveal the damaging effects of smoking, curiously, cigarettes still maintain a steadfast grasp on society. America's fascination with a substance proven to have unfavorable effects can be compared to the country's fixation with beer, another potentially harmful substance that can lead to loss of perception and coordination, sometimes with fatal consequences. In his essay "Beer," Ben Scott illuminates the strategy used by the mega-brewer Anheuser Busch to implant its products deep within American culture. According to Scott, "culture is shaped simultaneously from the inside and from the outside and from the inside. Anheuser Busch's goal is to gain control over the formative processes and direct them to the same ends: profit, exposure and influence" (71). The beer industry's tactical employment of the "external control" of media outlets makes the product ubiquitous and persistently imprints its image into the consumer's mind, and using "internal control" of media messages identifies the product with appealing events and images to form consumer associations between the product and desirable qualities (71) such as popularity, pleasure, maturity, health.
This marketing strategy markedly resembles that of the giant tobacco companies. A Smoking Gun: How the Tobacco Industry gets Away with Murder, by Elizabeth Whelan, Executive Director of the American Council on Science and Health, and Merchants of Death by Larry White expose the devious ploys of the tobacco industry and the advertising strategies employed to attract new consumers. Both Richard McGowan's Business, Politics, and Cigarettes and Peter Taylor's The Smoke Ring: Tobacco, Money, and Multinational Politics explore the surreptitious business and political affairs that transpire within the successful multibillion-dollar industry. The ongoing debate about advertising strategies that use a "smoke screen" of "external control" to secure a product's place in mass media and "internal control" to encourage positive associations with the product focuses primarily on the efficacy of the advertising ¾ does it make a customer buy or use the product? However, the ethics of promoting a harmful and addictive commodity go largely unexamined, and the real question, unasked: Why does the public allow itself to be manipulated by these strategies?
Although beer and cigarettes are potentially harmful and may have fatal consequences, the consumption of these products is far from perceived as a vice. Despite new commercial attempts cautioning against drinking and driving, media warnings of the fatal effects of smoking and even implementations of smoking bans, drinking and smoking still remain accepted in many restaurants and recreations, are glamorized in movie and books, and are especially popular among students. This conundrum can be partly explained by the industries' effective employment of external and internal control (Scott 71) to captivate the attention of the public through the insinuation of beer and cigarettes into every aspect of daily life. This is accomplished with the products' penetration of public space with billboards, commercials, and political contributions. The effectiveness of this strategy can perhaps be validated by the continual popularity and success of beer and cigarettes. "External control" ensures that the product is recurrently seen in advertisements and is pervasive in everyday events so that the product remains ingrained in the consumers' minds while "internal control" develops its appealing social connotations.