Authors: Richard Kluger
In the shadow of this debate, three of the most astute smoking control advocates co-authored a paper in the winter 1987 issue of the
Journal of Public Health Policy
which revealed the transparency of the tobacco industry’s claim that no governmental interest would be directly advanced by banning cigarette advertising, because such expenditures were not intended to attract new smokers, only to switch present smokers over from rival brands (for example,
The Great American Smoker’s Manual
, a Philip Morris publication intended to rebut Pertschuk’s
Smoke Signals:
“Cigarette advertising is aimed only at people who smoke … ”).
In their article, “Tobacco Advertising and Consumption: Evidence of a Causal Relationship,” Joe Tye, Kenneth Warner, and Stanton Glantz noted that cigarette smokers exhibit “one of the most tenacious brand loyalties of any consumer product”—only about 10 percent of them switched annually, and then often to other brands from the same manufacturer. Citing industry figures for 1983, the authors went on, “A simple calculation shows that brand-switching alone could never justify the enormous advertising and promotion expenditures” of the tobacco companies, which paid out $1.9 billion, it claimed, so it could switch over 5.5 million smokers (one-tenth of the total number). That worked out to a $345 outlay per switcher in order to reap gross revenues from that switching smoker of $347, even assuming that all switchers
came from other companies—hardly the case. Thus, no new profits could accrue from a transaction for that purpose alone, leaving only two economically viable motives for the huge expenditure. One was to hold on to customers who might be lured away by rival companies—a problem that might have been eliminated, of course, if none of the companies bothered or was permitted to advertise—as well as to those tempted to quit under the barrage of health charges. The second motive, of course, was to attract new customers, many of them necessarily adolescents, since most surveys agreed that about 90 percent of smokers began the practice by the age of twenty. And, contrary to repeated industry claims, Tye
et al
. listed many studies that found a reinforcing link between the impact of cigarette advertising on children and future use of the product
(e.g.
, “Out of the Mouths of Babes: The Opinions of Ten-and Eleven-Year-Old Children Regarding the Advertising of Cigarettes” by D. A. Fisher and P. Magnus in
Community Health Studies
in 1981, pages 22–26).
Whatever the legal, social, economic, or psychological justifications for entertaining a ban on cigarette ads and promotion, only the political will of duly elected legislators could make it happen. And that will, by the close of the ’Eighties, was not there. Even some antismoking activists were sympathetic to the view expressed by leading First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams, hired to help protect the tobacco industry from such a blow: “[I]t is at the heart of the First Amendment that we do not lightly strike out at speech to deal with social problems. We try to persuade people … with more speech.”
XIII
NOT
all of the publicity and promotional gambits that Guy Smith dreamed up for Philip Morris were inspired. There was the misbegotten 1988 exhibition in muscle-flexing, for example, when the company budgeted $5 million for an advertising campaign proclaiming the collective might of American smokers (“$1 trillion is too much financial power to ignore,” the first one was headlined) by way of announcing that their customers were damned angry and weren’t going to take it anymore. Just whom or what the flag-waving ads were targeting was unclear—possibly smokers themselves, to remind them that they were not alone in a hostile world.
But it was the American flag, not the company banner, that Smith waved in pulling off one of the more daring public-relations exploits in the annals of ballyhoo. Not only did he succeed in wrapping Philip Morris in the Bill of Rights and its cherished guarantees of tolerance—for smokers and smoking, along with other sometimes reviled groups and acts, it was implied though never stated—but even got the government of the United States to join in.
Spurred by fears that the proposed Synar bill banning cigarette ads might
catch fire, Smith launched a 1986 essay contest in defense of the First Amendment and against attempted encroachments upon it; prize money totaled $80,000, with $15,000 to the national winner and, by way of maximizing publicity, $1,000 to the winner in each state. A year later, to announce the contest winner, the company issued an attention-grabbing press kit. It took the form of a glossy black brochure bearing on its cover in deep red a picture of the Order of Lenin, the Soviet Union’s highest medal, and the words “One world-famous newspaper without cigarette advertising.” Inside was a copy of
Pravda
and a 444-page volume,
American Voices: Prize-Winning Essays on Freedom of Speech, Censorship and Advertising Bans
. The stunt steamed up Congressman Synar, who as chief sponsor of the ban bill termed its linkage to Soviet oppression “the basest, grossest form of redbaiting to protect their multimillion-dollar investment.” Smith, having struck a raw nerve, responded by adding innuendo to insult; the press kit did not imply that backers of the ban were “communists or anything else. … I’m certain they’re all card-carrying Americans. … The purpose is to make the point that advertising bans are a form of censorship, and everything that goes into
Pravda
is censored.”
Although Synar’s bill was stymied in Congress, the ad ban idea would not die, and so when a letter crossed Smith’s desk the following year from Don W. Wilson, the Archivist of the United States, seeking corporate support for the bicentennial celebration of the Bill of Rights to be marked in 1990, the wily publicist seized on it. Here was the ideal occasion to run up the company’s tattered ensign in defense of its continued right to advertise.
Wilson, a 1987 political appointee who had worked for both the Eisenhower and Ford presidential libraries, believed that the U.S. Archives were “an unrecognized national treasure” and that his mission was “to take it to the people and not let it become a passive warehouse intimidating to the public.” Disappointed by the Archives’ low visibility during the bicentennial of the Constitution the year he arrived, he wanted to mount a major national exhibit to honor the Bill of Rights, the original of which was housed on his premises. Since Congress was disinclined to parcel him special funding for so marginal a purpose, Wilson began soliciting top corporate givers, even as other federal repositories like the Smithsonian and the National Gallery had done with success. He received polite turndowns from General Motors, IBM, and other corporate heavyweights but got more positive feedback from Philip Morris USA, which wanted to organize a conference around the First Amendment as the focus of its salute to a Bill of Rights exhibit. Wilson knew that Congress had been mulling a bill to ban cigarette advertising and feared that the PM-USA interest in the undertaking was “too pointed and too narrow,” but when no other company came forward and a New York intermediary said he had a corporate client worth meeting with, Wilson found himself being spirited away to Guy Smith’s Park Avenue office.
The company was now prepared to celebrate the whole Bill of Rights, and the distinction between Philip Morris’s tobacco unit and its larger corporate parent was stressed to the Archivist; it was the latter entity that was prepared to undertake a major participatory role, as it had done with so many other leading cultural and social causes, and would forgo the use of any of the company’s brand names and logos, so nobody could complain that it was pushing a controversial product in promoting the Bill of Rights exhibition. “I was very impressed with their forthrightness,” Wilson recounted. “Smith was very clear about his motives—that the image-building aspect of the project was good for the company. And he said, ‘You may get some flak over this.’” Wilson found that the company had a high standing as corporate philanthropist and that other federal showcases had not been tarred by accepting Philip Morris funding. The negotiations warmed.
Smith’s vision of the event turned out to surpass Wilson’s ambitious hopes. The company would not only pay for an exhibit at the old U.S. Archives building on Pennsylvania Avenue, replete with recordings of presidential voices, but would also mount an elaborate road show, bearing the document to every state under the joint Philip Morris and Archives banners. Because the national repository could not, of course, let the original of the sacred relic out of its hands, the company would have to settle for one of the original copies, themselves precious documents. Philip Morris went to its home manufacturing base of Virginia, where a copy was housed in the state library, which, according to later press releases, “graciously” lent the document for the tour. Graciously, perhaps, but not gratis: the company agreed to donate $250,000 to the library, pay the cost for a staff member to accompany the document and ensure its safekeeping throughout the projected two-year tour, and other considerations. Besides this elaborate traveling display, the company also planned to offer the public, via print and broadcast advertising, free reproductions of the Bill of Rights along with educational materials about it.
Any other company or organization could have done the same thing, of course, since the use of such a document was not available for exploitation on an exclusive basis, but the imprimatur of the U.S. Archives as sponsor of the bicentennial promotion proved purchasable. The price that Wilson set was $500,000—the cost of putting together the exhibition in Washington—and an additional $100,000 contribution to a corporate sponsorship endowment for future commemorative events. Wilson’s staff was to review the company’s traveling version of the exhibit and any materials Philip Morris planned to distribute in order to certify their accuracy and to guarantee that the project was not being grossly commercialized.
As the preparations advanced, Wilson felt reassured by the quality of every aspect of the company’s efforts, from the excellence of the printing job on the reproduced Bill of Rights, to be sent to anyone who wanted a copy, to the roster
of national organizations that had been enlisted as supporters of and hosts for the traveling exhibition, including the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Boy Scouts of America, the Kiwanis, and state and local bar associations. The proposed layouts for the ads prepared for the celebration by Ogilvy & Mather seemed duly uplifting yet spare and to the point. Typical was one bearing a large photograph of Franklin Roosevelt and his words in appropriately big type, “Those who have enjoyed such privileges as we enjoy forget in time that men have died to win them.” A text block, unsullied by a hint of commercialism, read, ”Today, as we approach the bicentennial of the Bill of Rights, let us all, as President Roosevelt asked of us … rededicate its principles and its practice.” Who could object to that? The corporate payoff came in the relatively small-sized tag line at the bottom: “Join Philip Morris and the National Archives in celebrating the 200th anniversary of the Bill of Rights. For a free copy of this historic document,” readers were invited to phone an 800 number or write to the company’s Washington office.
Archivist Wilson looked at the proposed ads with open eyes. “I said to myself, ‘There’s risk here.’ But we were going to reach millions with the message, identifying the document with the Archives.” That it was similarly identifying it with Philip Morris, the nation’s leading cigarette maker, was secondary; after all, they were paying for the linkage, and no one else had been willing to. The only uneasiness that the company’s handling of preparations aroused in Wilson came from the belated discovery that the mailing tube enclosing the requested copies of the Bill of Rights (accompanied by a letter from PM chairman Hamish Maxwell) was imprinted with the names and logos of some of Philip Morris’s leading products—Miller Lite, Birds Eye, Jell-O, and Oscar Mayer among them. But the company had had the sense to spare him embarrassment by omitting the brand names of its cigarettes.
Wilson would not be spared the embarrassment of his own folly, though, when news of the deal with Philip Morris reached the public. The first burst of ire was directed at the company for making off with one of the nation’s enduring symbols of its liberty. Michael Pertschuk spoke for the tobacco control movement when he said that Philip Morris “should be treated like the Medellin drug cartel, not the Founding Fathers.” Sidney Wolfe of Public Citizen thought the projected campaign “smears the Bill of Rights with the blood of all Americans killed as a result of smoking Marlboros and other Philip Morris cigarettes”—precisely the kind of line that a number of company insiders had feared the project would invite. Wilson and his misguided agency came in for abuse, too. As
The New York Times
editorialized, it was a noble idea for any company to commemorate the Bill of Rights, “but why on earth should a federal agency help it do that?” The government had allowed itself to be taken in by lending its “priceless prestige” to “a shabby transaction,” the
Times
coneluded.
An Archives spokeswoman responded that the agency had thought it “very appropriate to stretch the taxpayers’ dollars this way. My understanding is that we were dealing with Philip Morris the corporation, not a smoking company.” Guy Smith concurred: “If [the public] think[s] well of the company through our support of the Bill of Rights, it follows that they’ll think well of our products … . This has nothing to do with cigarettes, nor will it ever.” Marketing experts saw through the scheme and thought it masterful. Said Al Ries of the Greenwich, Connecticut, consulting firm of Trout & Ries, “This is clever, subliminal advertising that really says, ‘Smokers have rights, too.’”
By the time the Philip Morris Bill of Rights road show set out in the fall of 1990, most of the criticism of the sellout had abated, and the campaign’s television commercials, patterned after its print ads were image-building, as Smith had envisioned. When the specially designed truck bearing the elaborately displayed Virginia copy of the Bill pulled into Barre, Vermont, its first stop, it was accompanied by an honor guard of twenty-six former marines and greeted by local dignitaries and prominent press coverage. Attendance, particularly by schoolchildren, was good; visitors were invited to offer their impressions in a thirty-second videotape, and educational kits bearing the corporate name were dispensed at the site and through schools. Anticipating some protests, Smith had ordered a “speakers’ corner” set aside near, but not too near, the mobile exhibition. At the first stop, antismoking protesters were hardly visible, but gay rights activists noisily challenged Philip Morris’s contributions to homophobic Senator Jesse Helms. Smith looked on impassively, then purred to reporters, “This is what [the First Amendment is] all about. They’re entirely entitled to their opinion—it’s a minority opinion.”