Smoking in Ads Now Is a Smoldering Issue

While shooting a recent print ad for Guess jeans, a cigarette-smoking photographer stopped to reload her camera. She handed her lit cigarette to the model and asked her to hold it for a moment.

When the photographer looked up, she saw the exact image that she wanted. As a result, a print ad featuring Guess’ newest model, Anna Smith, who strikes a sexy pose while holding the cigarette with a dangling ash, is now running in consumer magazines.

“It was entirely an accident,” said Paul Marciano, art director for Guess who quit smoking eight years ago and insists that smoking is a lousy habit. “But what can I say? When I saw the picture, I liked it.”

Guess isn’t the only non-tobacco advertiser that places models with cigarettes in its ads. Several major print advertisers whose products have absolutely nothing to do with tobacco are embracing the use of cigarettes and cigars in ads. Besides Guess, new print ads for Bijan Fragrances, Donna Karan fashions and even Columbia Pictures’ hit film, “Mr. Saturday Night,” feature cigarettes and cigars as focal points.

While the advertisers generally claim that the cigarettes and cigars are little more than incidental ad props, marketing experts say a trend may be smoldering. They point out that many marketers tend to copy whatever advertising trendsetters such as Guess and Bijan do. And advertising psychologists say the sexy and rebellious images of the smoking models, similar to those promoting tobacco products, could strongly influence teen-agers.

“In the 1930s and 1940s, films that showed all the glamorous stars smoking had a tremendous effect on the public’s attitude,” said Renee Fraser, an advertising psychologist and president of the Los Angeles agency Fraser & Associates. “There’s no reason why these print ads can’t do the same thing. Kids might think: This is what it takes to look cool.”

Not only is cigarette smoking showing up in ads but also in photographs that appear with magazine stories. A recent issue of Vanity Fair magazine upset some readers by running several photos featuring Luke Perry of the “Beverly Hills 90210” television series smoking with gusto. One picture even showed a pack of Marlboro cigarettes sticking out of his front pocket. Ironically, these images come at a time when fewer Americans are smoking--less than 25% of the population, compared to 42% in 1965. But smoking among younger women--at whom many of these ads are aimed--is on the rise. And while the tobacco companies and advertisers strongly deny it, some anti-smoking activists say this new ad trend may not be happening entirely by accident.

“I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the tobacco companies are playing some sort of role here,” said John F. Banzhaf III, executive director of Action on Smoking & Health.

The advertisers all insist that the tobacco companies played no role whatsoever. And executives at the Tobacco Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based tobacco lobby, are bemused by such accusations. “I haven’t even seen these ads,” said Walker Merryman, vice president at the institute.

Regardless of who--or what--is behind the trend, anti-smoking advocates don’t like it. “It’s absolutely appalling for a clothing manufacturer to use cigarettes to enhance the sexual attractiveness of their ads,” said Matthew Myers, counsel for the Washington-based Coalition on Smoking or Health.

The Guess ad, which appears in the October issue of Esquire, is modeled after some of the more glamorous advertising from the 1950s, Marciano said. “You have to remember, cigarettes were extremely common then.”

Glamour--or what company executives say is an attempt to portray glamour--also played a role in the use of a cigar-smoking female model in two print ads for Bijan Fragrances. One of the ads features a fashionably dressed model with a fat, half-smoked cigar placed between her teeth.

Although company founder Bijan Pakzad declined to be interviewed, he commented on the cigar-smoking model in a statement read by a company spokesman. “She is considered to be glamorous, sexy and sophisticated,” Pakzad said. “We in no way agree with or disagree with smoking. That is a family matter.”

Kerri Farley, who is Bijan’s national ad manager, said that although the cigar is lit, the company intentionally didn’t show any smoke coming out of it. “The ad is supposed to show that the woman is confident and self-assured enough to light up a cigar,” Farley said. “The premise of the ad is to tell women: You are what you want to be.”

The upscale fashion designer Donna Karan recently ran an ad in Vanity Fair for its line of male fashions featuring a finely attired male model with a cigar in his mouth.

“We really do not advocate smoking in any way,” said Patti Cohen, vice president of advertising. She noted that the cigar was unlit.

While many designers will do almost anything to get mass exposure for their clothing in cigarette ads--even loaning clothes for free--Donna Karan is so strongly against smoking that it refuses to loan its fashions to agencies that are making cigarette ads, Cohen said.

So why did it use a cigar in one of its ads? “It was really just a prop--an attitude,” she said.

Briefly

The Venice agency Chiat/Day/Mojo has won the $14-million ad business for MTV Networks’ Nickelodeon, Nick at Nite and MTV television networks. . . . The Westlake Village ad agency Kielhorn & Associates has won the ad business for Los Angeles-based Neutrogena Corp.’s dermatologic division. . . . Darox Interactive of La Jolla has selected Lawrence & Mayo of Newport Beach to create ads for their interactive training courses targeted at working nurses. . . . U.S. Divers Co. of Santa Ana has appointed the Creative Group of Irvine to design and produce projects to promote the Aqua-Lung. . . . Direct Response Partners, a firm that helps develop and distribute infomercials, has opened in Los Angeles. . . . Walt Disney Co. and American Express are about to cross-promote in an animated TV spot that features perhaps the ultimate example of commercialism: As the drawbridge is lowered to Cinderella’s Castle, it is revealed as a giant American Express card.