Cigarette ads were banned in 1970, but now they’re back — telling you shouldn’t smoke.
Philip Morris USA, maker of Marlboro cigarettes, and British American Tobacco, maker of Camels, will air anti-smoking ads that lay out the deadly effects of smoking cigarettes on television beginning this Sunday.
The ads are the result of a nearly two-decades-long legal battle between the tobacco companies and the federal courts. In 1999, the Clinton administration’s Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the tobacco corporations for lying and deceiving the American people about the effects of their products.
Racketeering laws prevented the companies from having to pay money, but they were ordered instead to issue “corrective statements” in ads, on their sites, and on cigarette packaging and store branding that list the dangers of the products.
The case was settled in 2006, but it has taken over a decade of back and forth about the wording of the ads for them to debut.
The ads will cost the tobacco companies an estimated $30 million, but you couldn’t tell with the ads themselves, which are merely black words on a white background with a female voiceover duly listing that the commercial is a court-ordered ad and offering the effects of smoking and secondhand smoke.
The commercials are ordered to air on TV five times per week, Monday through Thursday, during prime time for a year. Additionally full-page ads must appear five times over four months in the Sunday editions of about 50 national daily newspapers and on their websites.
Despite cigarette ads being banned from television and radio since 1970, the industry still manages to spend nearly $9 billion per year on advertising in the United States alone.
Many anti-smoking experts are saying that the ads won’t be as effective, as they are airing a decade after the ruling and media has changed so much in that time. Fewer people are watching television or reading newspapers, especially not the younger demographics that are most at risk for picking up smoking as a habit.
“That’s not where young people’s eyeballs are,” said Robin Koval, CEO and president of Truth Initiative, a nonprofit organization that campaigns against youth smoking, to the Wall Street Journal.
As the Centers for Disease Control points out, nine out of 10 smokers begin before the age of 18, but that demographic makes up less than 5% of TV viewers.
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