DECEMBER 15, 1997; Page A01

Smoke, Lies & Compromise - Part I

TOBACCO MAY SOON PAY MILLIONS FOR ANTISMOKING ADS.

ITS OWN ABILITY TO SELL COULD BE RESTRICTED.

IN ADVERTISING, A NEW BATTLEGROUND

By Shankar Vedantam

BOSTON - The researcher from the Massachusetts Department of Health asked the four 11-year-old boys sitting around the table what they would do if their best friend started to smoke.

"I would punch his face so he couldn't smoke," one said. "I'd give him a bloody lip."

"Who are the people who smoke?" MaryEllen FitzGerald asked.

"Mentally retarded people!" the same child shouted, prompting a chorus of laughter.

FitzGerald smiled too, playing along.

But she could not have been more serious. Behind her that September morning was a one-way mirror. In the darkened room on the other side, five eyes took in the scene intently - two account executives for an advertising agency and their video camera. They were trying to find out why children start smoking. It would help them make effective antismoking ads.

The other boys piped up: Smoking causes lung cancer, makes your heart beat faster, wrinkles your skin.

Would any of them become smokers? FitzGerald asked.

An emphatic "no" all around.

Behind the mirror, the account executives shrugged. This group could teach them nothing.

Then FitzGerald asked if anyone had tried a cigarette.

One youngster nodded. Then, seeing the others shaking their heads, he tried to turn his nod into a shake. But FitzGerald had noticed. She was stupefied. Why would a kid who thought smoking was stupid want to try it?

The boy said a friend had offered him the cigarette.

"Did he say it was cool?" FitzGerald asked, still baffled.

Behind the mirror, Charles Green and Emily d'Entremont leaned forward in their chairs.

The youngster shrugged. He had the infinitely bored look that 11-year-olds reserve for adults' dumb questions.

The exchange told the ad researchers something. Children, they concluded, don't make the connection between casually experimenting with cigarettes and getting hooked by them.

This was something they could build an advertisement around.

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THE $368.5 billion tobacco deal now before Congress promises a radical overhaul of the advertising playing field. Health groups and the cigarette companies are racing to adapt even before it is approved.

They know what's coming: a titanic collision of subliminal messages.

Antismoking groups, knowing that the settlement could bring them a windfall - $500 million a year from tobacco-industry coffers - are frantically overhauling their advertising strategies. They plan a major assault on youth smoking, since most people who are addicted start in their teens. The government says 3,000 children start smoking every day, and a third of them will eventually die from smoking-related diseases.

Tobacco companies, knowing that the settlement would ban all human models and cartoons - even powerhouses such as the cool Joe Camel and the macho Marlboro Man - are hard at work on subtle yet powerful new ads.

The Marlboro Man may soon pop up on television screens, but only as an antismoking spoof.

"The American Cancer Society can take the Marlboro Man, stick a cigarette in his mouth, and have him drop dead on the air," said J. Philip Carlton, a lawyer and former judge hired by the industry to help negotiate the settlement.

Still, it won't be easy for antismoking ad designers to outsmart an industry with marketing budgets that the Federal Trade Commission estimated at almost $4.9 billion in 1995. Advertising succeeds by repetition. Few companies repeat their messages as often as the cigarette companies, or as creatively.

The makers of Marlboro, Kool and Camel cigarettes spent more on billboards last year than any other company - $157.8 million. Cigarette companies outspent the 20 biggest nontobacco outdoor advertisers combined.

The advertising geniuses in these companies have sold billions of cigarettes by turning a camel into a cartoon and a cowboy into a salesman.

The antismoking groups have another obstacle. Unlike the tobacco industry, which must serve only its profit interests, the health people must be careful not to offend their many masters - medical professionals, politicians, special-interest groups.

Can the health groups' advantage of the moral high ground overcome the industry's inventiveness and size?

They will have to hurry. Already, the wizards of tobacco advertising are sneaking camels under the radar screens of America's conscious mind and redrawing the maps to Marlboro Country.

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A FEW HOURS LATER, four girls were led into the viewing room, and FitzGerald asked them to use a stack of pictures ripped from magazines to create their image of a smoker.

The girls, ages 11 to 14, took the pictures of models advertising cars, clothes and cosmetics and turned them this way and that, comparing ideas with one other.

Based on what they picked, and how they designed a collage, the researchers from Boston's Houston Herstek Favat advertising agency hoped to discover the issues that spoke to teenage girls. Smoking rates among girls this age are climbing even faster than among boys.

The Health Department wanted ads that would target girls at the age when many go from being adamantly against smoking to being tentatively interested.

Seizing glue sticks and markers, the girls went to work as FitzGerald buzzed questions at them: Why do girls their age smoke?

One said a friend smoked because her boyfriend smoked. There was a chorus of recognition at this from the others, who said most girls who smoked chose their boyfriends' brands.

This started Green and d'Entremont thinking. If girls smoke to gain social acceptance, why not show how cigarettes could stigmatize them?

D'Entremont felt the company needed to make an ad in which good-looking athletic guys say, "We don't date smokers."

A woman walks into a bar with a cigarette, Green said, his creative mind racing. She passes 10 guys sitting there, and each one rejects her. The spot ends with her sitting down at the end of the bar alone, looking down at her cigarette and saying, "What?"

D'Entremont liked the idea.

As they were talking, the girls in the focus group were creating the collage. One girl pasted a picture of a model with very dark eyelids and underneath wrote, "Look at her eyes."

Another girl pasted down a picture of a model with disheveled hair and wrote: "She can't afford a brush because she spends all her money on cigarettes."

A third girl cut off the hair of a model and wrote "NO HAIR! A result of smoking."

When the session was over, Green and d'Entremont huddled with FitzGerald. The trio gazed at the finished collage as if it were a map to secret treasure.

"It's all about appearance," FitzGerald said. "Smell. Looks. Hair. Money. They talk about health, but it's not it."

Antismoking ads would have to exploit the girls' concern about protecting their good looks.

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FOR DECADES, antismoking groups have appealed to people's reason by telling them about the dangers of smoking. Still, 50 million Americans continue to smoke.

The health groups are realizing that the only way to get people to quit is to appeal to their emotions, just as the cigarette companies did to get them started.

Cigarette ads don't sell cigarettes; they peddle promises of popularity and power. The health ads must therefore also whisper to people's desires to be admired and loved.

But just what do you whisper to kids? That's what Green and d'Entremont were trying to find out with their carefully selected focus groups.

Green planned to report their ideas to the "creatives" at their ad agency, the folks who would produce the ads.

The Health Department's annual advertising budget was $11 million, which buys about 24 weeks on television, radio and print. Massachusetts' antismoking chief, Greg Connolly, said the campaign had helped hold youth smoking rates steady at around 37 percent, while most of the rest of the country had shown increases. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that per capita cigarette consumption in Massachusetts was down 17 percent since 1992, three times the national average.

"The ad campaign is not a silver bullet, but it frames the issues," said Connolly. "It changes the social norms."

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THE MARLBORO MAN is the most successful advertising symbol in the world.

Of the million or so commercial campaigns ever created, said Bob Garfield, editor-at-large of the trade magazine Advertising Age, not one can match the cowboy.

Cigarettes may cause disease, leave nasty odors, and trap smokers in the chains of addiction, but when people see the cowboy in the lonely splendor of Marlboro Country, they subconsciously associate smoking with vitality, freshness and freedom.

The campaign was created in the 1950s by Chicago advertising agency Leo Burnett, who believed great ads were built around drama instead of gimmicks. Today, the cowboy peering from billboards over African plains and Asia's teeming cities is more than a symbol of what is American. He is America.

In the United States, Garfield said, the cowboy represents rugged individualism, a romantic solitude. Abroad, "it is all those things, plus the most important icon of American life."

The cigarette companies fought hard during the settlement talks with the states' attorneys general to make sure that no restrictions would apply abroad.

If the deal goes through, the Marlboro Man and Joe Camel are gone - but only in America.

The cowboy is a dramatic demonstration of cigarette advertising's primary tenet: Image is everything.

Introduced in the 1920s, Marlboro started off as a women's cigarette. It was "Mild as May." So women bought it.

Then in the 1950s, Philip Morris decided to go after a bigger market: men. It told its advertising people to link this "feminine" cigarette to machismo. The cigarette didn't have to change much. The image was what mattered.

So began a campaign that featured heroic types with tattoos, said Norman Muse, the former chief of Leo Burnett who presided over the development of the campaign. "They were sailors and policemen." The first cowboys showed up, too, in 1954.

In what may have been the worst advertising advice ever given, a research agency advised Muse against the cowboy because the cigarette market was primarily urban, and the cowboy was a rural figure.

But Muse - and Philip Morris - were already hearing better advice from a different source: the cash registers.

Why did it work? Muse didn't know. And he knew enough about advertising not to care. It sold cigarettes.

In fact, for a long while, the folks at the ad agency were so in awe of the power of the cowboy that they were "afraid to mess with it." It was mystical.

Now, Muse thinks the cowboy succeeded because he was the epitome of a hero.

"When you go back and look at it, there is very little product," he said. The cowboy "works for a generic kind of product," where there's little distinction between brands. And it spoke to men.

Muse said the ad agency didn't realize that it was making history. Or that the cowboy would draw the eternal fury of antismoking activists.

As far as he was concerned, the agency did nothing insidious.

"We just kept doing ads showing cowboys."

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CHARLES GREEN liked "Western." Over the last two days, focus group after focus group had shown the same reaction to the antismoking ad developed by the agency.

As another group of youngsters was about to view the ad, he knew how it would react.

FitzGerald turned on the television, and a cowboy, remarkably similar to the Marlboro Man, appeared on the screen.

Manfully riding his horse, the cowboy pauses to light a cigarette. The music is stirring, the scene distinctly Marlboro Country. Then the cowboy fumbles, and the lit cigarette falls from his lips onto his saddle between his legs. He yelps as smoke erupts from his pants. The horse takes off at a gallop, with the cowboy beating at his groin to put out the fire.

The kids roared with laughter.

Green and Emily d'Entremont smiled at each other.

"The crotch humor never fails," Green said.

But the Health Department didn't want kids to see cowboys beating at their crotches. It declined to show the ad during TV programs that kids watch.

It was frustrating to Green that, in working for the Health Department, he had worries that his counterparts working for tobacco didn't.

The cowboy ad wasn't the only one held back.

An advertisement on addiction, which Green thought was one of the agency's best, was squelched.

Green and his colleagues designed that ad after a teen told him what it was like to be addicted to cigarettes.

Imagine you are holding your breath, the teen said, until you think you can't hold it any longer, and you are about to die. That sense of asphyxiation is what addiction is like.

The ad company went to work.

Using an underwater camera, it shows a teenager floating underwater. He is fully dressed, down to the boots. He is still. His eyes are open and intense, as he fights to hold his breath. Little streams of bubbles escape from his nostrils. The deep hum of water is all around. He can't hold his breath much longer.

A voice-over whispers:

"Eventually, you'll have to breathe. It has nothing to do with willpower or choice. It's about need. That's the way addiction is."

The teen's face bursts with the strain. A rush of air escapes from his mouth. He gulps water. Panic enters his eyes. He starts to thrash. The surface seems miles distant.

The "Breathe" ad was well-received in test groups. Children related to it. It made addiction real. The agency started airing the ad.

But parents whose children had drowned started calling the stations. They said the ad was unbearably painful.

The Health Department pulled it. It had run only two days.

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SOME ANTISMOKING GROUPS look back and say the biggest mistake health experts made was to ban tobacco ads from television in 1971.

With the ban, health messages, which had been screened under equal-access laws, lost their funding.

"I don't want to ban their advertising. I want to get right up there shoulder to shoulder with them," said Eric Solberg, executive director for Houston-based Doctors Ought to Care, a national, nonprofit group that has specialized in spoofing cigarette ads.

"Truth may be good, but juxtaposition is better," he said. "If you have a billboard right next to their ad, people are going to be laughing at it."

The spoofing idea has proven popular. Bonnie Vierthaler, an antismoking activist in Harpursville, N.Y., has launched the Internet-driven "BADvertising Institute."

She has made an ad featuring the "ultimate crush-proof box" - a coffin. She has done one showing Joe Camel wearing a hood and carrying a giant scythe with the slogan "Smooth Reaper," a play on the "Smooth Character" slogan in the original ads.

"People make their decisions on the emotional level, and then they use their intellect to justify what they've decided," said Vierthaler. "Anyone who's gone on a diet and has opened a refrigerator and seen a piece of chocolate knows what it's like."

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EVEN AS THE INDUSTRY was agreeing to huge advertising restrictions in the settlement talks, its advertising executives were furiously finding ways around them.

R.J. Reynolds, which makes Camel cigarettes, knew it would likely have to get rid of the cartoon character. Designed in the early '70s to get around a French government ban on human models in cigarette advertising, it had long been the target of antismoking groups.

In May, the Federal Trade Commission charged that the campaign was aimed at kids and launched an inquiry.

Within days, the company announced it was switching, for "marketing reasons," to a new advertising campaign.

The new campaign, called "What You're Looking For," showed models peering over a martini glass or holding an ice cube in one hand. Somewhere in the picture, usually obscured, was the image of a camel. In the ice-cube ad, drops of melting water coalesced into a camel.

A University of British Columbia advertising professor, Richard Pollay, says the ads make use of a sophisticated technique called "closure." He explains, "Because you complete the puzzle, you have greater understanding of the message." In this case, the puzzle was finding the camel.

Dozens of ads for other brands were not far behind. In Philadelphia, a large billboard displayed the curious word "MARL."

In stores, Winston cigarettes started appearing in packs with "WIN" across the front.

The first new billboard that Kim Rotzoll remembers seeing whizzed by him in July as the University of Illinois advertising professor was driving into Chicago. The image seemed jagged. Amid a bunch of radiating circles was a camel. There was no slogan and no pictures of cigarettes. The surgeon general's warning was the only sign that the ad was for cigarettes.

Rotzoll, a former ad executive who teaches at the Urbana-Champaign campus, suspected that this was part of Reynolds' new campaign: training people to notice the camel in a picture.

Rotzoll saw Benson & Hedges ads showing cigarettes anthropomorphically lounging in hammocks or bent over a chessboard, and Marlboro ads without the cowboy.

There was a common theme, Rotzoll knew, even though the brands belonged to different cigarette companies. Already, months before any settlement could come into effect, the models were disappearing.

§

GIVING UP the Marlboro Man was one of the hardest things Philip Morris ever had to do. It was the only way to push through the deal last spring.

Class-action lawsuits were being filed throughout the country, and the company needed the settlement to keep the lawyers at bay.

Already, there was trouble brewing in Europe. Earlier this month, the 15-nation European Union voted to ban most tobacco advertising within four years.

So its advertising people went to work.

Billboards featuring burning campfires, teams of horses, rushing rivers began to pop up.

Company officials declined to say what the strategy was, but outside experts said they knew exactly what was going on.

"They are weaning the public," said Pollay, the Vancouver advertising professor.

"They are experimenting to see what works and what doesn't. They are gradually weaning into this so consumers adjust to the Marlboro ads. They are trying to get recognition patterns established."

"They are focusing on the 'Get the Gear' campaign," said one Leo Burnett executive, referring to the marketing plan that rewarded smokers with gifts, "belts and buckles, the Marlboro Campfire cookbook."

"Things," the executive said, "that are cowboyish, that can evoke the Marlboro campaign without the cowboy."

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AFTER COMPLETING dozens of focus groups, Green and d'Entremont spent weeks analyzing their data, trying to find out what antismoking approaches would work best with children.

The health messages had been useful - to a point. The teens knew the risks.

By October, they were ready to pitch their concepts to Stuart Cooperrider and Marc Gallucci, the people at Green's ad agency who would "execute" the ads, producing a storyboard and shooting the video.

Cooperrider had wanted Green to come up with a word or phrase to summarize the goal of each ad to help focus discussion.

Green proposed "out of control" for one ad. It would be a "truth spot" using model Christy Turlington, who had been addicted to smoking.

Cooperrider liked the idea.

"Think" was for an ad to convince kids that smoking wouldn't give them social status.

Cooperrider agreed.

The third ad would be about youths who don't think their experimentation can lead to addiction. The word was "trapped."

Right on, Cooperrider thought.

The fourth ad targeted the desire of girls 11 to 14 to emulate their older girlfriends by using cigarettes. The older girls had boyfriends and were cool. The word was "wannabe."

Cooperrider leaned forward in his chair.

"Isn't that derogatory, to say they are wannabes?"

"We are trying to challenge the image of the girl wanting to be older," Green argued.

"It's OK to want to be older," Cooperrider countered. "It's not OK to use a cigarette as the tool. You're targeting the whole feeling of being aspirational."

"So, it's too broad?"

"Yeah. You're telling me I'm a wannabe. Screw you. I'm going to flip the channel."

"TRAPPED," the ad about addiction, would be developed first, the agency decided. Cooperrider wanted to hear real voices, kids on the street, before he wrote the script.

So for days, Green and d'Entremont roamed Boston's chic Newbury Street, videotaping teen smokers.

When did you start smoking and why? they asked. Did you think you would get addicted when you first tried cigarettes? How many times have you tried to quit?

The responses were chilling.

"I've tried [to quit] a lot of times," one teenage girl said. "I was aware of how bad it was for me. I've been in the hospital a few times because I have asthma."

She went on: "I was in denial about being addicted. It's so hard to stop. It's the hardest thing to do."

Struck by the clips, Cooperrider thought the kids had an authenticity that no slick script could achieve. Why not use a series of these up-close interviews as actual ads?

For example, one ad could start with the message: "Nobody starts smoking thinking they'll get hooked."

Then they could splice in the boy who had said: "I figured like even though you're addicted, you can still not do it. But I didn't understand that it didn't work."

It was kids talking to kids, not adults preaching to kids.

They put rough cuts together to see if the idea worked.

In one, a teenager says: "It just seemed like weak people couldn't quit."

The screen goes dark. Then four words appear, one by one:

WEAK . . . STRONG . . . TALL . . . SHORT

It doesn't matter.

The screen fades out.

Finally the message: If you start smoking, you might not be able to stop.

The Health Department liked it. It authorized the production team to fan out across the state to talk with hundreds of teens and build ads around the best interviews. The 30-second spots would be aired starting Jan. 19. Some 95 percent of the kids in the target group would see the ads, an average of 12 times each.

The Health Department knew the tobacco companies had a huge head start. All across Massachusetts, cowboys were riding horses across the rivers of Marlboro Country. Camels were metamorphosing out of smoke rings.

If the tobacco deal went through, and provided an additional $500 million for antismoking campaigns, the battle could be joined in earnest.

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