Big Tobacco's New U.S. Ads Will Be Critical of Smoking -- WSJ
October 04 2017 - 03:02AM
Dow Jones News
By Jennifer Maloney
This article is being republished as part of our daily
reproduction of WSJ.com articles that also appeared in the U.S.
print edition of The Wall Street Journal (October 4, 2017).
Broadcast television networks and metro newspapers are about to
get a boost from an unexpected but familiar source: Big
Tobacco.
It's an old media buy to resolve an old fight. Starting as soon
as next month, Altria Group Inc. and British American Tobacco PLC
will begin running court-mandated ads to put to rest a lawsuit
brought nearly two decades ago by the U.S. Department of Justice
over misleading statements the industry had made about cigarettes
and their health effects.
The television spots, between 30 and 45 seconds long, will run
in prime time five days a week for 52 weeks, and will appear mostly
on ABC, CBS or NBC, Altria said. They won't have the graphic images
of a typical antismoking public service announcement. Instead,
these ads will be reminiscent of the disclosure statement at the
end of a pharmaceutical ad, displaying court-mandated text in black
on a white screen with a voice narration.
"Altria, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, Lorillard, and Philip Morris USA
intentionally designed cigarettes to make them more addictive," one
ad will say. Another reads: "More people die every year from
smoking than from murder, AIDS, suicide, drugs, car crashes, and
alcohol, combined."
Although the starkness of the black-and-white text ads could be
persuasive because they are so out of the ordinary, ad executives
said, it is unclear how effective they will be in an age when fewer
young people are watching broadcast TV or reading newspapers.
"The good news for the tobacco companies is they'll avoid a lot
of their younger audience" who would be more likely to see a video
ad on Facebook than a prime-time TV ad, said John Boiler,
co-founder of 72andSunny, an agency that does work for the
antitobacco nonprofit Truth Campaign. "I think they're getting off
kind of lightly."
Marlboro maker Altria, which owns Philip Morris USA, estimates
that it will spend $31 million to broadcast and publish the
statements on TV, in newspapers, on company-owned websites and in
pamphlets tucked inside the cellophane wrappers on cigarette packs.
A spokesman for BAT's U.S. subsidiary Reynolds American, which
makes Camels and acquired Newport maker Lorillard in 2015, declined
to say how much the company expects to spend.
All the defendants named in the Justice Department's 1999
lawsuit are now owned by either Altria or BAT.
Full-page print ads will appear in at least 45 newspapers,
including The Wall Street Journal, starting as soon as Nov. 26,
according to a document filed in U.S. District Court for the
District of Columbia Monday evening by attorneys for Altria, BAT
and the Justice Department, outlining their agreement. The print
ads will run on five weekends spread over about four months,
according to the court filing. Ads will also appear on the
newspapers' websites.
Tobacco companies used to be a staple of Madison Avenue ad
agencies with figures like the Marlboro Man and Joe Camel, but they
have sharply curbed their advertising spending in the U.S. They are
no longer allowed to advertise their products on television or
billboards, and their legal settlements have funded more than $1
billion dollars in antismoking campaigns.
"This industry has changed dramatically over the last 20 years,"
Altria's General Counsel Murray Garnick said in a statement, noting
that the company supported the 2009 law that gave the Food and Drug
Administration authority to regulate tobacco. "We're focused on the
future and... working to develop less risky tobacco products."
The FDA recently unveiled plans to overhaul how it regulates
tobacco, aiming to reduce nicotine in cigarettes so they're no
longer addictive and encourage cigarette smokers to switch to less
harmful alternatives.
Write to Jennifer Maloney at jennifer.maloney@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
October 04, 2017 02:47 ET (06:47 GMT)
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