Pictured above: White men

This “ad” is for..well it’s for nothing. It’s part of the Truth campaign, which, as far as I can tell, is marketing spite towards “Big Tobacco”. I’ve mentioned them before in this previous article.

I have so many problems with this ad it’s hard to find a place to begin. Like I’ve said before, it’s easy to come up with an ad when you are not beholden to producing any sort of result. The whole Truth campaign has this wonderful task. I am reminded of Ad Busters magazine in that all they seem to peddle is a mindset of hating whatever the creators hate. As Ad Buster magazine seems to hate any form of advertisement (guess they chose the wrong industry to work in), this ad seems to think any form of targeted marketing is racist.

Pictured above: White men thinking

This ad puts me in the odd position of defending “Big Tobacco”. Granted they did withhold information about how dangerous tobacco might be, and supposedly they marketed cigarettes to children. But this ad doesn’t talk about those things. It presents a fictitious scenario where “Big Tobacco” is 100% racist in its approach to selling tobacco to blacks. So selling tobacco to blacks is more wrong than selling tobacco to any other adults? Or is selling tobacco to blacks akin to selling tobacco to children? If a product is available and you announce the risks, and you market it equally to everyone, I don’t see how that makes a company racist.

The ad skirts potential libel/slander issues by having the fake company labeled “Big Tobacco”. Of course no such company exists. And they disclaim that the conversation is “based on” marketing work done by “Big Tobacco”. This could just mean that a tobacco company looked at ways to sell their product to different demographics. But what this ad presents is nothing short of inflammatory.

I’m sure if you presented the marketing discussion that led to this Burger King ad, for example, you could paint a bunch of white guys sitting around talking about how to sell more hamburgers to blacks and Hispanics as grade-A racists. Marketing products to different demographics is just part of the business. But still conversations about the subject probably are not so ham fisted, and in a huge company I’d be willing to bet they might actually employee people of different races who might have a better cultural perspective on what sort of messages might register throughout different racial demographics.

I can’t believe I left Family Ties for this show

This ad is a lot of selective judgment. If it just targeted tobacco’s effects on health, that would be fine. If it did that it would be serving some kind of public-awareness function and might make some kind of societal difference.

This ad doesn’t do that though. It just “punishes” tobacco companies for daring to think of strategies to market their product to blacks. Probably every big company in America deals with this issue. Why attack tobacco companies alone for it?

If the argument is “cigarettes are deadly and tobacco companies are racist for marketing them to inner-city blacks” then why not make the same claim about beer companies? Drinking and driving is deadly, and so is alcohol abuse. Beer companies market plenty of products to blacks. Why not launch a campaign against them calling “Big Beer” racist?

I find this ad pointlessly inflammatory, and have trouble believing it made it to air. Tobacco companies now have all the proper warnings and their advertising is carefully scrutinized so that they don’t target children. They aren’t even allowed to advertise on television. If an adult chooses to smoke, it’s not because they were hypnotized by the advertisements. If blacks choose to smoke, it’s not because of a racist conspiracy launched by “Big Tobacco”.

If the conversation in this ad were actually true, the ads these hopelessly white men came up with would be so offensive they would probably have the reverse effect on their target audience anyway. This is the kind of ad that can only be made when you have to produce no results whatsoever. I can’t wait to see their next campaign against man’s inhumanity to man. I’m sure it won’t be scrutinized and will be made in a low-stress environment so the creative forces behind it don’t have a mental breakdown if they feel they are being challenged to think at all.

Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em!

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