Does it kill to advertise?
Paul Johnson
The 1981 'best campaign' prize in the Poster Advertising Awards has just gone to the Collett Dickenson Pearce agency for their Benson & Hedges cigarette series, which features those wickedly-ingenious pyramids. These ads carry the government h.ealth-department warning but the question now being asked in the industry is how much longer cigarette advertising will be permitted at all (it is already banned on TV). Over the whole advertising field there is the whiff of censorship in the air. Indeed, in a defensive move, the Advertising Standards Authority, now under the vigorous direction of Lord MacGregor, my old chairman on the Royal Commission on the Press, is itself taking space to explain how many practices it forbids already. . Norway has operated a total ban on cigarette advertising since 1975. The results so far do not seem to prove anything. Most Norwegians have traditionally rolled their own cigarettes. Consumption of handrolled cigarettes is down. But this was happening anyway. Consumption of fac.tory-made cigarettes is still rising. But this would have happened anyway, too. Total consumption is marginally down and, the number of male smokers has dropped, since the ban, from 52 to 43 per cent (women smokers have risen from 32 to 33 per cent). But is this attributable to the ban or to the rising consciousness, especially among the well-educated, of the harmful effects of smoking, a much deeper, a long-term social force of which the advertising ban is merely a superficial reflection? There is no doubt that, among the middle classes everywhere. , the social pressure against smoking .is increasing, and the majority of their children emerge from school not only as non-smokers but ascensorious abolitionists. At the same time quite a different set.of social forces has been boosting smoking among women, and especially among working-class women. As they have become less submissive, more independent, as a larger percentage go into full-time work and enjoy large disposable incomes, so they have tended to smoke more. We can expect the rising curve of women smokers to level out — it is already showing signs of doing so — and eventually to fall, merging with the declining curve of smokers generally. But in the meantime women's health statistics reflect the consequences of more 'freedom'. Bobbie Jacobson, an anti-smoking campaigner, claims in her book The Ladykillers that the growth in the number of cigarettes smoked by women in Britain led to a 50 per cent increase in lung-cancer rates between 1969 and 1978. Like all the anti-smoking lobby she blames advertising and draws attention to ad-campaigns aimed specifically at women. Exactly the same case can be made out against liquor advertisements which, increasingly, have women drinkers in mind, and whose appearance has coincided with a phenomenal rise in female alcoholism. But in both cases the effect of advertising has been no more than to reinforce a trend springing from a fundamental change in the patter of purchasing power. Women are paying a heavy price for 'liberation': more and more of them are committing felonies, going to jail, dying of lung cancer and cirrhosis, having illegitimate babies, getting raped and getting divorced.The part that advertising plays in this revolution is pretty small. What is more, advertising does not have to be commercially-motivated to be effective. The man who probably did most to boost cigarette-smoking in Britain was the Prince of Wales, later Duke of Windsor, who infuriated his father and delighted the tobacco barons by constantly smoking in public. The royals don't do that any more. Nor do TV personalities on the whole. It is gradually disappearing from film scripts.
As sex and multiracialism raise their heads, so the noxious weed is stubbed out. But the archives remain. Rupert Murdoch recently delighted an Advertising Association lunch by asserting'. 'The showing of any old Humphrey Bogart film probably does more to encourage younger people to smoke than all the cigarette commercials ever made'. That goes equally for the old tunes, like 'Smoke Gets in Your Eyes'.
All the same, commercial advertising is an identifiable factor in the problem and therefore a target. The industry finds it hard to defend itself without denying its own effectiveness. The official ad-man's claim that cigarette advertising is merely a battle between particular brands for a share of the market, though broadly true, is scornfully rejected by the health-campaigners,who are winning converts for censorship all the time. The notion that we live in an age of tolerance is a fantasy. As Carlyle pointed out in his book on Cromwell, nobody is ever tolerant about the things they really care for. We are tolerant about religion today because we no longer have strong views on God. But in places like Ulster and Iran, where religion still matters, men go on killing for dogma. In Western societies, you can now print four-letter words and show full-frontal nudes on stage because we no longer sanctify sex or treat it seriously. But to publish or utter a 'racist' epithet has been made a legal offence, and a woman expert is employed full-time by the ILEA to go through all the books used in London schools and libraries to find and censor 'sexist' expressions. That is because race and feminism are fighting issues. The sort of narrow-minded zealots who once worked for Laud's Court of High Commission or the League Against Vice are now employed by the Race Relations Board and the Equal Opportunities Commission. I dare say Mrs Whitehouse is fighting a losing battle against The Romans in Britain; certainly she represents the old censorship, on its way out. The new censorship operates under titles like the 'Campaign for Press Freedom', flourishes progressive credentials and includes the health-and-safety lobby. It is very much on the upsurge. The advertising industry has not yet grasped the scale of the challenge which faces it. The pressure on smoking ads is just the beginning. Indeed, I would say tobacco advertising is probably a lost cause already. I doubt if there will be any cigarette ads by 1990. The next great battle is going to be fought over drink ads, where the movement to unleash a public panic about alcoholism is still in its early stages. The Labour Party is in the process of being captured by the forces of the New Intolerance. On the assumption it is likely to hold office sometime in the decade we must prepare for comprehensive prohibitory legislation. What we need is a new John Stuart Mill to reformulate the libertarian creed in the light of its current enemies.
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