Smoking >> What kind of mugs do they take us for?

If you want to know more about the links between the tobacco industry and Hollywood, and how it affects you, try this site: smokefreemovies.ucsf.edu/index.html

The tobacco companies, of course, deny everything, just like they’ve consistently denied that sponsorship of sports events like Formula One motor racing has any effect on cigarette consumption. So why do it then? In the words of one industry executive: “No one hands over big cheques just to give themselves a warm fuzzy feeling.” They do it because it works. Teenage boys who are into motor racing are twice as likely to try smoking as those who follow other sports.

Many of these indirect forms of advertising are aimed at making smoking seem ‘normal’, something that lots of people do and that society finds acceptable. This tactic weakens our resistance to cigarettes – we see cigarettes and tobacco company logos all around us, in films and on television, and it makes it seem more reasonable to give it try.

Over the last few years though, people have got wise to the tobacco industry. As a result of court cases against them, the tobacco companies have had to release thousands of internal documents which show that they have been lying for years – about the addictiveness of nicotine, about the health effects of smoking, and about their use of advertising. You can find some here. The upshot of this is that since last year most forms of tobacco advertising have been banned here altogether, with the few remaining forms (such as sponsorship of Formula One) due to end within the next couple of years.

This means that the industry is trying frantically to find new ways of targeting young people such as:

• the internet, where clubs and events are promoted, but once you get there, the emphasis is on promoting smoking and getting your contact details for direct marketing efforts afterwards;
• email;
• viral marketing – where individuals are encouraged to pass on a marketing message to others;
• mobile phones and text messaging.

In the end, the tobacco companies’ underhand tactics will only work if people take them at face value. Fortunately, you media savvy teens of today are not as easily taken in as your parents’ generation were. If you’re aware of what they’re trying to do, then you can ignore it or resist it. After all, do you really want to give your hard-earned cash to an industry that talks about its customers like this? “Slobs – 27% of cigarette smokers, aged 18-24 years, are represented by this cluster… Describing members of this cluster as ‘Slobs’ may seem unkind, but this title is particularly earned by their low concern with their appearance and the little effort they make to keep themselves informed.”

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