As I was looking back through my blog I saw my post on tobacco and advertising and it got me thinking about the current tobacco industry.
I’ve noticed a recent fascination with E-Cigarettes. Mostly by teens around my age and to me it feels a bit like history is repeating itself. I decided to compare old tobacco advertisements to more modern depictions of tobacco.
This is an excerpt from one of my earlier blog posts on the advertisement strategies of Tobacco companies in the 1960s:
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Towards the beginning of the newspaper years, around 1960, most of the advertisements were cigarette ads and they depicted them as a product for adventurous folks. In order to be “cool”, you had to smoke.
From Healthcare-Administration-Degree
Additionally, advertisements like this portrayed smoking as healthy habit – not at all bad for you!
This didn’t come as a shock, I feel like most people are aware of the decent amount about the rise and fall of the tobacco industry. It was still interesting, though, that the Santa Clara University newspaper would advertise a product now banned from campus.
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Here’s a Tobacco advertisement from this past year:
From Advertising Age
Now obviously the advertisement styles are extremely different and the way that they depict tobacco is also different, but some of the core concepts of both of these advertisements remain the same.
In the older advertisement above, cigarettes are depicted as healthy and something that even the most educated and well respected members of society use.
In the bottom advertisement tobacco is being branded as “hip” and cool and there’d be no way that a cool sleek technology like that could kill you right? I’ve talked with some people who use Juul’s and they’re always shocked to realize that what they’ve been doing (which may seem harmless) is actually just as harmful as cigarettes.
I don’t care if people understand the consequences of cigarettes or e-cigarettes and still choose to use them, but it frustrates me when something like this is pitched as a safe alternative, when in reality it’s almost just as bad.
History repeats itself and we still as a society have not managed to learn that tobacco in any form is extremely harmful to people’s health.
We always think our generation is different or better or that the things we do have to be more informed because we’ve seen all of the previous generations mess up so much.
But we’re not really. Hopefully the next generation will finally catch on to the fact that tobacco is bad.