FTC Choice Defended Tobacco Ad

WASHINGTON —  An economist whose writings were used to defend a tobacco company’s right to advertise Joe Camel to teenagers during a Federal Trade Commission investigation will become the FTC’s new consumer-protection chief, according to government and industry sources.

J. Howard Beales III will take the job, which includes policing advertising and business practices, when Timothy J. Muris assumes the chairmanship of the agency next week, the sources said.

Beales will be the first nonlawyer to head the agency’s consumer arm. Like Muris, Beales served at the commission during the Reagan administration, working under Muris when he had the job Beales is about to assume.

After leaving the FTC, Beales became a professor at George Washington University--and a consultant to R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. It was while he served in that role that the company used a paper he wrote for it to defend itself against FTC allegations that it was unfairly targeting teenagers and encouraging them to start smoking through its Joe Camel advertisements.

Beales found that Joe Camel--who had become almost as well known as Mickey Mouse--didn’t encourage teenagers to start smoking. In a 1993 study of teenager attitudes on smoking, he found “no evidence to support the notion that advertising has an important or powerful effect on teenagers’ decisions” to smoke.

Instead, Beales concluded that teens were more likely to start smoking if their close peers or older siblings did.

The FTC dismissed the Joe Camel case in 1999, after the multistate tobacco settlement banned the use of all cartoon characters to promote any tobacco product.

Beales didn’t return phone calls Wednesday. In an interview, Muris said, “We intend to be aggressive, and Howard agrees with that.”

Matthew Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids, on Wednesday likened Beales’ appointment to “putting the wolf in charge of the henhouse.” He added: “Someone with those kinds of ties to the tobacco industry, whose position on the impact of advertising, particularly on young people, is so far out of the mainstream, cannot be counted on to protect our kids.”

An agency source said Beales will recuse himself from tobacco cases.

In an article he wrote three years ago, Beales criticized excessive regulation of advertising.

“Advertising is both less powerful than its critics fear, and more important to consumer welfare than they are willing to acknowledge,” he wrote in a book review about advertising. He cited an ad campaign for fluoride toothpaste that increased sales and reduced cavities and had “benefits to consumers that are surely greater than the gains to toothpaste advertisers.”