These developments, while public health successes, have also served to drive tobacco's youth recruitment efforts underground, where they continue, shrouded in coded language and the all-too-familiar denials. The ensuing spate of state and federal legal victories over Big Tobacco has, among other things, specifically banned traditional means of marketing to young people, such as cartoons, billboards, and advertisements in periodicals with significant youth readership. They also unmasked Big Tobacco's disdain for its targets. These documents laid bare, in the industry's own damning words, the oft-denied targeting, seduction, and recruitment of minority groups and children. Even more vociferous protests castigated the design and marketing of cigarettes and tobacco blends targeted exclusively at African Americans.īy the mid-1990s, Minnesota Attorney General Hubert Humphrey III wrested a legal settlement from the nation's major tobacco companies into which he incorporated a brilliant public relations stealth bomb: He forced the release and publication of Big Tobacco's secret internal marketing and research documents on the Internet for all to read.
Public health advocates and African American activists joined to protest such egregious forms of targeted marketing as the saturation of urban communities with billboards. But by the late 1980s, tobacco firms could read the writing on the billboard.
Sports sponsorships, cartoon characters, and trinkets clearly labeled yesterday's marketing efforts to children and youths.
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Reynolds Tobacco Company had built its fortune by marketing to “the young, poor, black, and stupid.” 1 A tobacco executive who risked such candor today might add, “the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and Hispanic.” But such loose talk is very unlikely today because a series of legal reversals and losses in the court of public opinion have created an acutely circumspect tobacco consortium.ĭecades ago, flagrant, disrespectful stereotypes marked the industry's initial courting of African Americans. A DECADE AGO, FORMER Winston honcho David Goerlitz sneered that the R.