Scarcnet News Summaries (Advocacy Institute)
Op-Ed Sees Hypocrisy In Philip Morris Youth Prevention Campaign
Length: pages
Abstract
An op-ed in ADVERTISING AGE by Fred Goldberg, chairman-CEO of Goldberg Moser O'Neill in San Francisco, questions Philip Morris' use of Y&R Advertising to produce its youth prevention campaign when Y&R is the same advertising agency that it uses for its tobacco ads: "After creating ads to secure 'replacement smokers' from the ranks of the country's youth, it's got to be difficult to turn around and create a campaign that attempts to do just the opposite.What's a creative director to do? He walks from one meeting, where he has just asked the creative team to make sure the people in the ads look sexy and beautiful (oh -- and make sure the pack is nice and large), into the next, where he muses that teens need to take away that it's not cool to smoke, so they shouldn't. . . . Now, if Philip Morris was really serious about this effort to discourage teen smoking, it would have given the business to an agency (and there are lots of them out there) that, on principle, has never and would never advertise a cigarette. . . . [I]t shouldn't make any of us in the profession' wonder why advertising people are ranked just slightly above car salesmen in credibility."
Source: Fred Goldberg, "Is PM Blowing Smoke In Anti-Tobacco Ads?" ADVERTISING AGE, January 18, 1999, p. 24.