Collection: More Doctors Smoke Camels

The ethical standards of advertising are obviously very, very low.

> It was a different time

Not that different.

> and people genuinely did not know the harms of smoking like we do now

The tobacco companies knew very well. IIRC, the medical community kinda-sorta knew and kinda-sorta suppressed the knowledge.

I remember, in the 1980s, the American Heart Association never listed tobacco as a contributor to heart disease. I'm pretty sure that the tobacco industry figured highly, in their funding sources.

These days, they are very adamant that tobacco is a big factor.

Also, I believe that a lot of stress research (the one that created the "Type A personality") was funded by the tobacco industry.

> It was a different time and people genuinely did not know the harms of smoking like we do now

My grandmother (born in 1928, started smoking at 13) said that, growing up, people casually referred to cigarettes as "cancer sticks".

I can't get to worked up about the way the surveys were conducted since this was advertising. If R.J. Reynolds were trying to publish peer reviewed papers based on there survey results and excluded the fact that the doctors were given free cigarettes that would be more of an issue. I'm sure much worse stuff was done in an effort to hide the health effects of smoking but it's not something I have familiarity with.

Best for your Tumor zone!

Marlboro was originally marketed to women under the slogan "Mild as May", before being repositioned as a cigarette for men in the 1950s.

https://tobacco.stanford.edu/cigarettes/light-super-ultra-li...

One potential reason might be because these ads were in women’s magazines? I’m sure they advertised in men’s magazines as well. It would be interesting to compare.

You may want to search "Torches of Freedom" and go down that rabbit hole.

I think it's because so many men smoked that marketing to women was a growth opportunity.

Advertisements in general are usually targeted to women, still today. They spend more and make the spending decisions if they have a husband.

I see magazines with multi-page ads which read exactly like articles but have additional labeling that they're explicitly ads written by the company instead of ads written by the writers of the magazine. Often with slightly different styling.

This example magazine has a number of single page ads with a good bit of copy in them. I'm trying to find an example magazine with those multi-page ads at the moment though.

https://flickread.com/edition/html/676148065c1ba#1

The people who are actually interested in your product will generally want lots of information. Prior to the internet, how did they actually get that information? Overwhelmingly, through print advertising. If people who have no interest in your product see the headline and turn the page before getting to the body copy, that's no real loss; if people who are interested in your product have questions that aren't answered by the copy, that is potentially a very real loss.

I suspect that there was little data to analyze how much attention the ads were commanding back then.

I often think about how so many things now have been optimized (mostly for profit) to the extreme by data-driven processes, with big corporate marketing certainly being one of them.

Up until two or three decades ago, I suspect that it was all based on tradition and the "gut feel" of out-of-touch and arrogant executives talking to each other over drinks (thinking of scenes from Mad Men here).

No website to check the details of a product either

> No smart phone in the waiting room to compete with?

Yes. Sometimes it was a deliberate tactic - mostly adverts would go for the 'just an evocative picture', but a few would go the 'wall of text' route. My memory pops up the name Alan Sugar for an example of those - really dense walls ...

People with self respect will find it insulting if an advertisement doesn't try to convince them with copy. In the past, advertisers wanted to be careful to not insult their prospective clients. Modern ads usually have an undertone of "we despise you" towards their prospective clients. I guess they figured out that it's better spent dollars to try to reach people without self respect.

There would have been a stack of these magazines in every home and each page would have been picked over several times.

When I was a child magazines were still very popular and I would not rest until every last millimeter of each one was examined in detail multiple times.

We used to get Abbott & Costello tapes out from the library for long road trips in the 80s. To this day I still remember those Camel ads.

Today, the message is brought to you by fanduel and bet365

Ironically, Huff was then hired by the tobacco industry to write a book undermining the evidence that smoking causes cancer. It was to be called How to Lie with Smoking Statistics, but never got published: https://www.refsmmat.com/files/papers/huff.pdf

I think you don't mean "statistically significant" here, but something like "relevant" instead. Something can be statistically significant and entirely irrelevant if the effect size is too small.

> despite there being at the time almost zero evidence for

This isn't true—people had been connecting the dots for a few decades by the time these ads were running [0], and right around the start of the run (1940) was when strong evidence was starting to get published:

> Scholars started noting the parallel rise in cigarette consumption and lung cancer, and by the 1930s had begun to investigate this relationship using the methods of case-control epidemiology. Franz Hermann Müller at Cologne Hospital in 1939 published the first such study, comparing 86 lung cancer ‘cases’ and a similar number of cancer-free controls. Müller was able to show that people with lung cancer were far more likely than non-cancer controls to have smoked, a fact confirmed by Eberhard Schairer and Eric Schöniger at the University of Jena in an even more ambitious study from 1943. These German results were subsequently verified and amplified by UK and American scholars: in 1950 alone, five separate epidemiological studies were published, including papers by Ernst Wynder and Evarts Graham in the USA and Richard Doll and A Bradford Hill in England. All confirmed this growing suspicion, that smokers of cigarettes were far more likely to contract lung cancer than non-smokers.

So it's less a case of people intuiting what was bad for them and more a case of the industry trying (and for a few decades succeeding) to get ahead of a growing scientific consensus by advertising it into irrelevance.

[0] https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/21/2/87

> Generally people have a good handle on what's good and what's bad for them

Hard disagree, the cultural norms play a huge role and the changes are slow. I'm like 95% sure the unabated addiction to social media so prevalent nowadays will be regarded similarly to how smoking and drinking is seen now.

We should be really extrapolating what we know about tobacco now and the things they claimed in the past towards currently relevant issues e.g. "Facebook papers"-type materials.

I don't understand why you think there would have been 0 evidence. The countless respiratory illnesses associated with smoking are readily obvious by taking even a small sample of longterm smokers - a decent chunk of them will sound like smokers, be occasionally hacking up a lung, and so on.

People obviously knew smoking was unhealthy, but chose to do so anyhow. And companies naturally worked to trt to strengthen that cognitive dissonance. Same thing today, but it's slightly more subtle. For instance in a typical Coke ad you'll generally see people that look nothing like regular Coke drinkers - health, fitness, and good body weights abounds.

Ronaldo's Coke/water moment gave me a vast amount of respect for him - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x2ZLS1V3iMw&pp=ygUbUm9uYWxkbyd... It's how the sort of people Coke gets to pose with their product actually feel about it.

I think they are saying that they are paying more to the tobacco suppliers than their competitors - kind of like saying "we use quality ingredients".

There was another ad where they put quotes from tobacco farmers that said "nobody pays more for my tobacco than..."

I think modern term is "Premium". Which is more expensive than standard. Maybe it is more indirect, but it is very often there.

In 60 years time it will look just as strange to see product advertisements from today boasting '10% reduced CO² impact' or 'climate neutral'. I don't have a clue what they'll advertise with by that time but I do know it will look strange to those about half a century later. The advertising industry was never about objective truth, always about subjective emotions and I do not see that change other than advertising becoming ever more targeted.

Social media. I think many people already realize this, but it hasn’t yet hit a tipping point.

In terms of things that we allow to be advertised but probably shouldn't: sodas, medical products, politicians.

Covid vaccines, sugar, plant meat...

This is a bit broad. Tobacco was very significant in Virginia and Maryland (which, along with North Carolina, did use it as money for a period—before the United States was an independent nation [0]). Its influence outside of that region was significant, but I wouldn't characterize it as foundational.

[0] https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/dictionaries-thesauruse...

If there’s any truth to the pop culture trope of trading cigarette cartons in prisons, it possibly never stopped being used as currency.

> high cost of Camels ("costlier tobacco".)

If memory serves, cigarette packs were priced fairly close to each other. They were implying they did not skimp on the quality of the source product (unlike the other brands' thieving profiteers ;-)

Oh but it gets so much worse: https://tobacco.stanford.edu/cigarette/img0742/

You are confusing science with ad copy.

It’s kind of a “tell”, right? On the face of things, it would make just as much sense to say “More software devs smoke Camels than any other cigarette.” You wouldn’t call out “doctors” unless everyone knew this was unhealthy.

Assertion: a tobacco company used misleading marketing practices.

Conclusion: science is a lie.

the antidote to bad science has always been more science by independent experts.

what else would you suggest?

Do you know why I only drink grain alcohol, Mandrake?

Which science don't you trust, the science that once said smoking is harmless or the science which currently says smoking is harmful? Or do you cover all your bases and just not trust science regardless?