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Smokin’ Women

Dec 7, 2017
1 min

Smokin’ Women

After WWI, Vienna-born Edward Bernays (1891–1995), known as the “inventor” of public relations and the father of spin (and Sigmund Freud’s nephew), was hired by the American Tobacco Company to encourage women to start smoking. While men smoked cigarettes, it was not yet publicly acceptable for women to do so. Tobacco needed more customers. Bernays staged a dramatic public display of women smoking during the Easter Day Parade in New York City and alerted the press to expect th

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So Many Coughs, So Little Air

Mar 3, 2017
1 min

So Many Coughs, So Little Air

Once, there were more cigarette brands than you could shake an ash at. The field was increasingly reduced as big tobacco bought up little tobacco and threw all their weight behind the major brands. Then came medicine to prove that these little packets of joy were as unhealthy as drinking raw sewage. We still endure smoke but not these vintage cigarette packs. Only one brand, King Sano, manufactured by US Tobacco, focused exclusively on health claims in their ads. King Sano ci

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Smokin’ Ladies

Jul 31, 2015
4 min

Smokin’ Ladies

Women have come a long way from the pre-suffrage era when it was unladylike to smoke. Taken up as a cause célèbre, women’s right to cigarettes was a smokescreen in the struggle for more fundamental rights. On the way to achieving first-class citizenship, women became first-class tobacco consumers. And if women were going to smoke, reasoned the tobacco industry, then why not encourage them to smoke a lot? By 1910 advertisements hinted that smoking was a right—and by the 1920s

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Hazardous to Your Wealth

May 15, 2015
1 min

Hazardous to Your Wealth

In 1975, the tobacco company of Yerevan, Armenia, ran a citywide contest asking for a redesign of its cigarette packaging. Ashot Stepanyan was one of a few hundred artists/designers who entered. “He won!” his daughter, graphic designer Mariya Stepanyan, recently told me. Armenian “My mother tells me while the tobacco was harvested and packed in Armenia, the packaging was produced in Germany and it was beautifully printed and embossed with gold foil trim. I think this packagin

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Do You Inhale and Other Smoking Questions

Jun 20, 2014
1 min

Do You Inhale and Other Smoking Questions

When ads for cigarettes were tolerated, indeed ubiquitous, throughout American media, the pitches often asked questions of the audience. Apparently, it was a good way to get attention and bring the customer into the fold. The questions have resonance today. Here are a couple. You can’t be a-smokin’ if you don’t inhale the smoke. You can’t be a shooter with out a-smokin’. Not a question, but what a statement! Legends in Advertising Awards Print’s new competition recognizes ou

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Smoking’s Poster Boy 1900

Nov 5, 2013
1 min

Smoking’s Poster Boy 1900

What’s fun about looking at old cigarette advertising is how guileless they were. Take this advertisement for Omar Cigarettes. The portrait of the gent on the links who’s played a “bully round” looks, well, like the epitome of an anti-tobacco message. The linkage between the headline “When a Cigarette Tastes Sweetest” and the wizened granddad is off the mark. This should be the “after” pic in a before smoking and after smoking for a dozen years scenario. Then there’s the copy

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Mad Men’s Peggy and the Truth About Cigarette Branding

Apr 4, 2013
2 min

Mad Men’s Peggy and the Truth About Cigarette Branding

Mad Men is hooked on cigarettes. And it just can’t stop. And, as an audience, we’re exposed to the underbelly of vintage cigarette ads. In the first scene of 2007’s pilot–set in 1960 and titled “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”–Don Draper talks with a waiter about Old Gold vs. Luckies. He shortly learns that they’re all poisonous. The theme continues, wafting through Don’s controversial “Why I’m quitting tobacco” ad to the last scene from this past season, when he lights up while ent

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