Educating young people on cigarette ad strategies
Despite today’s heavier regulation and a decline in overall domestic tobacco ad spending, the Jacklers warn against becoming complacent. They compare the industry to a“chameleon” — able to adapt its message to the surrounding culture -- and a “many-headed hydra” — able to bounce back from regulatory defeats. According to Robert Jackler, “The industry employs the most talented advertising professionals which money can buy to conjure up ever more clever means of ensnaring teen “starter smokers” to replace those whose lives were cut short by consuming their deadly products.” He points out that cigarette companies, barred from some methods of advertising, are now turning to retail promotional incentives and social media campaigns to get their message out.
The collection includes photos of point of sale campaigns at local convenience stores to document these strategies. One shows cigarettes displayed beside candy racks, a place where teenagers congregating after school are likely to see them. Other images record recent promotional efforts seemingly aimed at young women, such as pink-themed and candy-flavored cigarettes. In 2009 the FDA banned the sale of many flavored cigarettes, but the Jacklers note that companies continue to push peach, grape, and mint-flavored oral tobacco and mini-cigars sweetened with honey.
The Jacklers want to educate young people about the tobacco industry’s efforts to target them by juxtaposing historic and contemporary ads and pointing out the common themes. Robert Jackler says, “Young women seeing these images at first think they are a joke. After seeing the old images of a doctor smoking and today's women targeted ads, typically teens become outraged at the industry’s attempts to manipulate them.” Working with Stanford Research into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising (SRITA), they have developed a popular website, made the ads available in digital form to researchers, and curated a travelling museum exhibit entitled “Not a Cough in a Carload: Images from the Campaign by the Tobacco Industry to Hide the Hazards of Smoking.” They have displayed it at universities throughout the country, and circulated a similar exhibit in Brazil. They are also tapping into the social media rage with their own on-line video entitled “Behind the Smoke.”
What motivated the Jacklers to amass such a collection? For one, smoking’s hazard to women: lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths among women – it surpassed breast cancer in 1987. The epidemic in lung cancer among women, notes Robert Jackler, began about thirty years after tobacco companies began targeting women in their advertisements. It can be directly attributed to the industry’s successful conversion of women to smoking through advertising and branding campaigns.
But there is a more personal motivation driving the project, too. One of those smoking-induced lung cancer deaths was that of Robert Jackler’s mother, Marilyn E. Jackler. He recalls the “the suffering and loss of dignity” she endured from lung cancer, and notes, “She has been gone some a few years now, but our passion to study tobacco advertising, marketing, and promotion has only intensified.“ One of the ads in the collection really reminds him of her. It shows an elegant and sophisticated woman who exudes pride in her femininity, holding a cigarette and exhaling. It reads, “Believe in Yourself!”
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In addition to his work with SRITA, Robert Jackler, is Sewall Professor and Chair of the Department of Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery at the Stanford Medical School and a faculty research fellowat the Clayman Institute for Gender Research. Laurie Jackler is a curator, digital artist, and writer and a member of the SRITA team.
Natalie Marine-Street is a PhD candidate in United States History at Stanford and a writer on the Clayman Institute for Gender Research student writing team. Her research interests include women's, business, and consumer history.
All ads are from the SRITA, a Stanford research group which analyzes the effects of tobacco advertising, marketing, and promotion. Participants in this interdisciplinary program include faculty and students from several Stanford School of Medicine departments as well as the departments of History and Anthropology.
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