Cigarette Advertising Analysis

Cigarettes, Alcohol, and Cars, Oh My!

An Analysis of Cigarette Advertising

Advertisements about cigarettes is nothing new, in fact these advertisements have been enticing consumers for decades. These advertisements all painted the same picture that smoking is great for you, everyone is doing it, even your doctor. The use of sex appeal to sell the product by eluding that cigarette smoking is attractive and entices the opposite sex. Cigarette advertising can be traced back all the way to 1884, when James Buchanan Duke hired Edward Featherston

Small to help promote his cigarettes around the world. Celebrities were photographed using

Duke 's cigarettes to make advertisements that would be displayed where ever he could place them. Several of the

Throughout the decades advertising would promote the use of cigarettes in a

Cortez 2 positive and healthful image. This is where beautiful men and women would be seen socializing smoking a certain brand of cigarette, or having doctors surveyed, ranking their favorite brand of cigarette, all the while making the consumer feel more and more comfortable with indulging in this habit. Fast forward a couple of decades, and cigarette advertising takes a whole new spin on how it promotes cigarette smoking. This is where the advertising about how cigarette smoking causes tooth and gum disease, cancer, and even death begins to start. The negative side of this habit begins to overpower all the ads that make the consumer feel all warm and fuzzy. Now is when teenagers and older people are being interviewed unable to speak, showing hospital rooms where patients are dying of cancer, and even funerals. All because they decided to pick up that first cigarette. Cigarette advertising has been a long standing debate that has been glorified and ostracized in the same sentence. For those of you that have survived through all of these decades in advertising have literally seen the good, the bad, and the ugly being used as

The addictive nature of cigarettes combined with the lifestyle marketing made them very appealing to soldiers, hence your first big marketing population(Mayer 197). During this time another huge advertising platform would begin, Lucky Strike brand cigarettes would promote to an audience that had always been thought of as taboo, the female population.

Previously, there had been an intense social stigma associated with female smoking; in fact, a women 's "mortality and image" were said to be "at stake" when it came to her smoking in

Cortez 3 public(Mayer 197). This all changed when Lucky Strikes cigarette company hired a female model to walk in the 1929 NYC Easter Parade, using their product. The word was spread and many took notice, making this a great success in advertising.

In 1930, the number of cigarettes sold in the U.S. skyrocketed to 119.9 billion. Lucky

Strikes were socially acceptable for both genders to smoke(Mayer 197). Now that the female population had been used to gain acceptance and awareness of cigarette smoking, it was time to move on to the next use in advertising, famous people. Lucky Strikes would pay actors and actresses to promote their brand of cigarettes on and off the screen. Smoking was highly