[ Post a Response | The Sublime Desire of Cigarette Smoking ]
Posted by Jax
on February 6, 2011, 9:04 am
Being the diligent historian that I am, I have spent months digging through the Tobacco Documents website (www.tobaccodocuments.org), in search of the cigarette ads.
Jesus Christ.
We'd all be smokers if they ran them,
Blatantly sexy, the siren is even louder when creativity is relegated to the safelty of Madison Avenue. The most blatantly sexual ad I ever saw that saw the light of national distribution was a Benson & Hedges as: For Peop[e Who Like To (####) Smoke. She was wearing a sheet in a bathroom, holding a lit cigarette by her bed-tousled hair. The second panel, larger, show the recently sexualized woman deeply inhaling in profile wrapped only in the sheets from her bed.
God.
Oh, there are a few others.
But the ones I found were amazing.
To wit: Unseen Salem Enjoyment ads with sex kittens holding a pack of Salems: "If you don't like your cigarette (partner), try mine (me). Her name is Josyanne. Another Golden Lights ad shows beautiful women deeply inhaling (an undustry no-no). One said, simply, as she was inhaling down to the lower lobes, "Taste The Pleasure (My Pleasure"). Her name was Gay Ann. Forgotten Kent campaigns which would have been stunning, rotting in the basement of the Minnesota Master Settlement Document Repository.
A shame.
A Winston girl, breasts out, a couple of guys throwing a girl in the air (threesome) while she sultrly asserts, "Come to Winston, When Your Taste Grows Up."
I'll come to Winston.
I'll grow up just to be with her.
Kent beauties, Salem vixens (Annette, Bond, Linda) practically beg with their green eyes for you to look at them smoke and want it.
Badly.
Test marketers in Spokane, Cleveland, and the other Usual Suspect Burgs where Real People and Their Real Opinions are sought, and offered some comments about the ads as well: "I want to be with that girl.The girl is stunning. Well, my friends, if you want to bond with Bond, smoke a Salem 100 ("People smoke for enjoyment. Remember? Yeah, I do, even though Bond told me she didn't smoke. She was horrified when I suggested that she started me smoking: "Oh, I would feel terrible about that,"
Huh.
You sit there with your breasts exposed, green eyes to match Salem pack, and you aren't trying to get me to smoke? Hmm.
There are some fascinating protoads for Golden Lights. A woman with two cigarettes in her mouth lights it for a hunky dude behind her. Never seen that in an ad before.
Other brands fared less well. The 1970s mostly featured tar and nicotine tables, like a baseball boxscore. Smokers were rare.
Exception: Winston and Salem.
"I Smoke For One Reason."
And what would that be, darling? To get men? Well, it worked.
My apologies for the frank language, but people write for pleasure, remember?
I will happily upload of update if Vesparae deems it appropriate.
I know a woman who is obsessed with these and other ads, and repeats the copy as she comes with smoke flowing out of her grateful little mouth, a Kent 100 (Yes, we smoke them). True.
So I will keep researching. I want to find out who the models are, and whether they are still smokers, or, indeed, passed through Vesperae's lovely door. Wow. Kent got it all together. Sex and death.
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