Stanford researchers cigarette ad collection reveals how big tobacco targets women and adolescent girls

by Natalie Marine-Street on Thursday, April 26, 2012 - 12:55pm If the nearly ten billion dollars spent by the tobacco industry in 2008 to encourage Americans to smoke doesnt shock you, perhaps the story the ads tell will. It is a story that has special relevance for young women and teenage girls and feminists of all ages. For nearly 100 years, cigarette companies have worked hard to attract female customers, and they have been effective. In 2008, 18.3 percent of women (thats 21.1 million of them) smoked. Research by Stanford scholars Dr. Robert Jackler and Laurie Jackler presented at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research shows how tobacco companies have tailored their marketing campaigns to appeal to young women. Cigarette advertising has suggested that smoking will make women thinner, more self-confident and independent, and more fashionable, sophisticated, and cool. These tricks of the

Lucky Cigarette ad (source: SRITA)

tobacco trade have remained surprisingly consistent despite changing beliefs about smoking and womens rights.

Cigarette smoking and womens rights

Over the past six years, the husband and wife duo has amassed a collection of nearly 15,000 cigarette advertisements and worked to analyze the themes contained in them. The ads show that the story of women and tobacco is enmeshed with the story of womens rights. Smoking was largely a male preserve until the World War I era. Women appeared in tobacco advertisements prior to this time, but

they were depicted as serving cigarettes to men, and their fashionable and often exoticized images were designed to appeal to men. This matched a cultural attitude towards womens smoking that linked it with loose sexual morality and even prostitution. During World War I, however, as women grew more assertive and visible in public life, ads targeting women as smokers began to appear. By the mid-1920s, market-seeking tobacco companies set out more purposefully to attract women smokers. They sensed a change in cultural attitudes and a reduced threat from prohibitionist forces that would outlaw smoking along with alcohol. To vanquish remaining cultural taboos, they appropriated individualist and feminist messages and presented smoking as a way for women to demonstrate their liberation from confining traditions. In an ironic echo of the giant suffrage parades of the prior decade, one enterprising company marched cigarette-smoking women in flapper-style dress down New Yorks 5th Avenue. They called the cigarettes the womens torches of freedom.

The Jacklers exhibit also shows that for nearly a century the cigarette industry has lured women by equating smoking with thinness. When the young flappers of the 1920s embraced a slimmer and lessconfined bodily ideal, the cigarette companies followed suit. Ads suggested that smoking would make women thin or allow them to avoid bulkier figures as they aged. One companys popular slogan urged women to Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet. In the 1970s companies created new womens cigarettes with names such as Slims and Thins which today have become the even more anorexic Superslims. Says Robert Jackler, In 2012, women-targeted cigarette brands are almost universally promoted as slender, thin, slim, lean, or light. Some brands have even gone so far as to recommend cigarette diets. While it may be tempting to dismiss these campaigns as quaint Americana from the days
Virginia Slims Ad (source: SRITA)

before everyone knew better, the Jacklers warn that we should think again. They show earlier ads alongside more contemporary ones to demonstrate the persistence and adaptability of marketing themes directed at women. Tobacco companies continued, for example, to co-opt messages about womens empowerment throughout the twentieth century. The Phillip Morris Company developed Virginia Slims cigarettes to appeal to women, and their Youve Come a Long Way, Baby advertising campaign coincided with the emergence of second wave feminism in the late 1960s. In the mid-1990s, the brand used Its a Woman Thing as a slogan, and more recently adopted the tagline Find Your Voice. Cigarette ads often feature women smoking together like sisters or proclaiming their individuality and their independence from, or even dominance over, men.

Educating young people on cigarette ad strategies

Despite todays heavier regulation and a decline in overall domestic tobacco ad spending, the Jacklers warn against becoming complacent. They compare the industry to a chameleon -- able to adapt its message to the surrounding culture -and a many-headed hydra -- able to bounce back from regulatory defeats. According to Robert Jackler, The industry employs the most talented advertising professionals which money can buy to conjure up ever more clever means of ensnaring teen starter smokers to replace those whose lives were cut short by consuming their deadly products. He points out that cigarette companies, barred from some methods of advertising, are now turning to retail promotional incentives and social media campaigns to get their message out. The collection includes photos of point of sale campaigns at local convenience stores to document these strategies. One shows cigarettes displayed beside candy racks, a place where

Russian Cigarette Ad (Source: SRITA)

teenagers congregating after school are likely to see them. Other images record recent promotional efforts seemingly aimed at young women, such as pink-themed and candy-flavored cigarettes. In 2009 the FDA banned the sale of many flavored cigarettes, but the Jacklers note that companies continue to push peach, grape, and mint-flavored oral tobacco and mini-cigars sweetened with honey. The Jacklers want to educate young people about the tobacco industrys efforts to target them by juxtaposing historic and contemporary ads and pointing out the common themes. Robert Jackler says, Young women seeing these images at first think they are a joke. After seeing the old images of a doctor smoking and today's women targeted ads, typically teens become outraged at the industrys attempts to manipulate them. Working with Stanford Research into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising (SRITA), they have developed a popular website, made the ads available in digital form to researchers, and curated a travelling museum exhibit entitled Not a Cough in a Carload: Images from the Campaign by the Tobacco Industry to Hide the Hazards of Smoking. They have displayed it at universities throughout the country, and circulated a similar exhibit in Brazil. They are also tapping into the social media rage with their own on-line video entitled Behind the Smoke.

What motivated the Jacklers to amass such a collection? For one, smokings hazard to women: lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths among women it surpassed breast cancer in 1987. The epidemic in lung cancer among women, notes Robert Jackler, began about thirty years after tobacco companies began targeting women in their advertisements. It can be directly attributed to the industrys successful conversion of women to smoking through advertising and branding campaigns. But there is a more personal motivation driving the project, too. One of those smoking-induced lung cancer deaths was that of Robert Jacklers mother, Marilyn E. Jackler. He recalls the the suffering and loss of dignity she endured from lung cancer, and notes, She has been gone some a few years now, but our passion to study tobacco advertising, marketing, and promotion has only intensified. One of the ads in the collection really reminds him of her. It shows an elegant and sophisticated woman who exudes pride in her femininity, holding a cigarette and exhaling. It reads, Believe in Yourself!

Phillip Morris Ad (Source: SRITA)

Activist Hamdiya Cooks (Photo: Paige Parsons)

In addition to his work with SRITA, Robert Jackler, is Sewall Professor and Chair of the Department of Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery at the Stanford Medical School and a faculty research fellowat the Clayman Institute for Gender Research. Laurie Jackler is a curator, digital artist, and writer and a member of the SRITA team. Natalie Marine-Street is a PhD candidate in United States History at Stanford and a writer on the Clayman Institute for Gender Research student writing team. Her research interests include

women's, business, and consumer history.

For more information:

Center for Disease Control Data. Federal Trade Commission Cigarette Report for 2007 and 2008 Smoking Facts: Women and Tobacco Use
Susan Burton, Robin Levi and Hamdiya Cooks (Photo: Paige Parsons)

Founded in 1974, the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University creates knowledge and seeks to implement change that promotes gender equality at Stanford, nationally, and internationally.
Copyright 2010 Board of Trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.