Ashes to Ashes (37 page)

With two important exceptions, everyone at Philip Morris was now pleased with the look of the design. Manufacturing boss Ames was unhappy because the bottom of the hinged lid cut right across the middle of the top part of the white house, so that unless the printing and dye cut were precisely right, the roofline image would not line up evenly and the whole look of the design would be destroyed. Joe Cullman, Jr., in his advisory capacity as board member and senior tobaccoman, thought the Marlboro logo lettering was distinctive and elegant to a fault—
i.e.
, hard to read. Both objections were overridden when test-marketing results showed that the pack design scored well on supermarket shelves.

The last element in product design was the form and color of the filter tip: should it be recessed like the Parliament or flush like all others, and should it be an antiseptic white or of simulated cork? The former in each case was seen as an implicit appeal to the health-conscious, while the latter was thought rather more masculine in appeal. The various combinations were tried out toward the end of 1954 in four test markets—Providence, Rochester, Dallas, and Denver. While the tests, in which the flush-end, cork-tipped version used in Dallas would prove most successful, were being carried out, the small New York ad agency given the Marlboro account for its introductory campaign went broke, and Millhiser led the scramble to find a replacement in time for the scheduled end-of-the-year debut in the New York market.

In the winnowing task, it was perhaps inevitable that Millhiser would turn his colleagues away from the big East Coast and Madison Avenue agencies and urge consideration of a small, nineteen-year-old Chicago agency with fewer than thirty accounts but a rising reputation for homespun craftsmanship. Its presiding genius was founder Leo Burnett, a small, dumpy, and authentically shy native Midwesterner of sixty-three, with cigarette ashes perpetually spilling down his rumpled suit jacket. His appearance, manner, and philosophy of advertising were the polar opposite of the usual Madison Avenue huckstering. Among his first accounts had been the Minnesota Valley Canning Company, for whom Burnett’s agency had created the symbol of a jolly green giant.
The image worked so well that the company changed its name accordingly and stayed on ever after as a client while Burnett became the embodiment of the “Chicago school of advertising,” which in contrast to New York-style slick-ness stressed what its roly-poly exponent called “finding the inherent drama in the product and writing the ad out of that drama rather than using mere cleverness. … You have to be noticed, but the art is in getting noticed naturally, without screaming and without tricks.” He favored directness, horse sense, and conversational language over the mannered and cute. From such values were fashioned the classic campaigns featuring Allstate Insurance’s “good hands,” United Airlines’ “friendly skies,” the Pillsbury “doughboy,” Kellogg’s “Tony the Tiger,” and Maytag’s “dependability people.” To Philip Morris in New York, betting heavily that its new Marlboro brand could keep the company in the big leagues of cigarette manufacturing, Burnett seemed like someone with his finger on the nation’s pulse—a native small-town Michigander who once worked as a police reporter in Peoria, Illinois, and
knew
what played in Hometown, USA.

The Burnett agency was sent the projected Marlboro package and the hurry-up call to develop an ad campaign redolent of virility yet not offensive to women. Joseph Cullman III and Philip Morris ad director Roger Green entrained for Chicago shortly thereafter and at once got two pieces of advice about the Marlboro package. American consumers expected their brand names to begin with a capitalized letter; the lowercase “m” at the beginning of the Marlboro logo as presented on the package may have been different, but the differentness served to trivialize the product—it had to go. Similarly, the diagonal peppermint stripes that formed the chevrons on the red “roof” of the pack were too fussy and distracted from the clean, strong basic design.

The conviction and confidence with which Burnett made his presentation left Joe Third even more receptive to the first proposed ad for Marlboro that the agency unveiled the next morning. The most striking, graphically demonstrable feature of the new cigarette was without doubt its hinged-lid package. Yet as Burnett himself would later comment, the container was “very handy for carrying buttons and fish hooks, [but] people don’t smoke boxes.” The innovative package was modestly displayed in the bottom left of the layout, lid lifted, but the only written reference to it was a small-type mention of the product’s “
NEW FLIP-TOP BOX
,” and “flip-top” it would be called forever after. Most of the black-and-white ad was devoted to a photograph of a cowboy.

“We asked ourselves what was the most generally accepted symbol of masculinity in America,” Burnett said in recounting the creative process. The runner-up candidate was a taxi driver, that crusty, embattled, and quintessential urbanite. But to succeed, the Marlboro had to reach out beyond the old Philip Morris citified constituency, and who better to embody the appeal of the new brand than that mythic figure so deeply etched in the American grain—the
cowpoke? So Burnett’s people hired a model with marginally rugged, squinty-eyed good looks, stuck a black wrangler’s hat on him and a cigarette in his mouth, and proclaimed, “New from Philip Morris” across the top of the picture and, in much bigger type below, the Marlboro brand name in letters resembling, but thicker and more visible than, those on the package logo. The brief, clean text block explained, in an approximation of cowboy-straight lingo: “The new easy-drawing cigarette that delivers the goods on flavor. Long size. Popular filter price. Light up a Marlboro and be glad you’ve changed to a filter.” There was not a word about smoking and health, no false promise of mildness or protection against evil irritants. Marketing head Joseph Cullman liked the cowboy idea right away because, as he remembered, it conveyed “a certain gritty honesty and flavor.” The cowboy, however incongruous to metropolitan sensibilities, was approved as chief pitchman for the New York kick-off at the close of 1954.

At Richmond, the pace became frenetic. There had been endless problems with the Molins box-making machines when they arrived at the Stockton Street factory, where the initial Marlboro run was under way. The dye cut for the box kept breaking down, so that only two of the six machines were operative for much of the time. And the fiberboard content of the Marlboro box was absorbing moisture from the cigarette tobacco inside, producing a soggy feel that could be cured only by laminating the box—a further complication in the tricky packaging operation. The manufacturing crew, tinkering endlessly, worked a seven-day week now, racing to get out enough of the new brand to meet the hoped-for demand in the introductory market. “We worked late every evening,” engineer Joe Lloyd remembered, “going home for a shower break—there were no such facilities at the plant—and coming back in. Everyone knew there was an awful lot riding on it.”

Truly, the whole future of Philip Morris was at stake. Its sales had slipped another 13 percent in 1954, or nearly twice the industrywide loss for that year. Even the newly and expensively acquired Parliament, after a long run of unbroken sales gains, suffered a 10 percent loss under the PM aegis as the company’s overall market share fell to 8.7 percent, dropping it to No. 5 in the industry.

But down in Winston-Salem, where a few of the first, strikingly different packs of the new Marlboro had been snatched from New York tobacco counters and shipped for close examination, Reynolds’s vice president for sales, Bowman Gray, Jr., took a few deep drags of their much smaller rival’s cigarette, fingered the flip-top package, and was said to have remarked to his associates, “Philip Morris will have to be watched closely from here on in.”

^*
A milligram is 1/1,000 of a gram, or 1/28 of an ounce.

The Anguish of the Russian Count

IF THE
emerging scientific evidence left smokers throughout the ’Fifties with the choice of altogether abandoning their precious and protean source of instant gratification in this life of endless travail or switching to a modified form of it possibly less menacing to their health, plainly they would opt for the latter course. The result was a remarkable transformation in the cigarette business in the second half of the ’Fifties. At the outset of that period, about one of ten smokers used filter-tip cigarettes; by the close, more than five in ten were using filters, medicinal-tasting mentholated brands were booming, and unfiltered Pall Mall had become the No. 1 best-seller, partly on the strength of the absurd premise that its greater length somehow made it less noxious.

To stay competitive, all six of the major manufacturers were now offering a stable of brands—unfiltered regulars and kings, filtered regulars and kings, and menthols—and clamorously advertising in a marketing free-for-all dubbed the “tar derby,” in which conflicting and unsubstantiated claims abounded. For a time it seemed that any filter would serve: they all took away some of the bad stuff, didn’t they? The fact was that the brands combining the least effective filter with the strongest tobaccos sold the best, as if the public were just going through the motions. Surveys showed that while 70 percent of the switchers said they had taken up filters out of concern for their health, more than half of them doubted that the change would make any real difference. To judge by the sales figures alone, the scare over smoking seemed to have passed by the end of the ’Fifties, when total consumption was up 18 percent over the mid-decade figure; in 1960, per capita annual consumption of cigarettes for all Americans
age eighteen and over reached a record 4,171, or eleven and a half smokes for every person every day.

The tidal shift in brand choice by smokers was accompanied by technological changes in the industry which improved its profitability even as they were supposed to reduce the risks to its customers’ collective health. Filter material was 15 to 20 percent cheaper than the equivalent length of the tobacco it replaced, and the stronger-tasting leaf used to counteract the filtering effect was less costly than the milder leaf. Reduced use of nitrogen-based fertilizers helped cut nicotine yields, as did the industrywide adoption now of reconstituted leaf, which also reduced tar intake and, due to its lower density and the development of puffed leaf in the following decade, cut the amount of tobacco used per cigarette by one-third—a major advance in cost-cutting. Changes to reduce the suspected hazards of smoking included advances in the configuration of the filter and the introduction of new materials, like activated charcoal; perhaps still more important by the end of the ’Fifties was the use of smoke dilution in the form of more porous cigarette paper and, in subsequent years, smoke ventilation through microscopic holes punched mechanically or electrically in the tipping paper around the filter’s circumference. The porous paper, admitting more oxygen, helped the manufacturer by quickening the burn rate (so smokers bought more packs to sustain their puff level) and may even have benefited the smoker by producing a somewhat cleaner burn with fewer resulting toxic wastes from incomplete combustion.

Despite the industry’s public disavowals of any profound health consequences from smoking, work being done in company laboratories evidenced sophisticated knowledge of the biochemistry of the process and its grave potential to do harm. By way of example, Philip Morris’s research director, Robert DuPuis, sent a memo dated July 20, 1956, from Richmond to the company’s top officers in New York reporting in ventilated cigarettes “a proved decrease in carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide plus an increase in oxygen content of the smoke;” the former, he explained, was “related to decreased harm to the circulatory system as a result of smoking,” while the latter meant there would be less chance of depriving cells of oxygen “and of starting a possible chain of events leading to the formation of a cancer cell.”

So long as the medical evidence against cigarettes remained soft and anecdotal, the industry did not hesitate to use specious or highly suspect scientific claims to sell its product. But as the scientific case against smoking began to crystallize in the ’Fifties, industry leaders American Tobacco and Reynolds backed away from the health pitch in the belief that any talk of the hazardous nature of cigarettes and relief therefrom through the miraculous new filters being purveyed noisily by the industry’s also-rans would serve only to amplify the apprehensions of smokers.

This division in industry ranks was narrowed in 1955, when the toothless
regulators at the Federal Trade Commission promulgated a seven-point guide for advertising by cigarette makers aimed at eliciting their voluntary compliance. To avoid becoming embroiled in ten-year legal battles to defend their spurious come-ons, the manufacturers were asked to refrain from their most egregiously deceptive claims, starting with any representation of “medical approval of cigarette smoking,” like Liggett’s L&M ads promising “Just What the Doctor Ordered,” Camel’s “T-Zone Test,” or the smiling presence of white-coated medicos. The guide explicitly ruled out any claims concerning the effects of smoking “on the (a) nose, throat, larynx or other parts of the respiratory tract, (b) digestive system, (c) nerves, (d) any other parts of the body, or (e) energy.” Nor was any claim to be allowed of lowered tar and nicotine yields due to the length of the cigarette, the addition of a filter, “or for any other reason … when it had not been substantiated by competent scientific proof … that the claim is true, and if true, that such a difference or differences are significant.” Thus, Brown & Williamson could continue to describe its Viceroy brand as containing “20,000 filter traps” and American Tobacco could shortly introduce its Tareyton “dual filter” with “activated charcoal” so long as both descriptions were factual and no health advantage was explicitly claimed as a result; what the smoker inferred was his problem. Meanwhile, the companies were free to rhapsodize about the taste, flavor, and pleasure of their product.