Tobacco Industry

The main aim of adverts is to communicate to likely consumers with a view of encouraging, persuading, or even manipulating the audience who may include readers, viewers, or listeners to continue with their intake of a given product or start doing so. To achieve this end, the adverts use different methods to reach out to the consumer. Such methods include making the audience want associate more readily with the product.

Many adverts line up benefits for uptake of the products. They display people who to whom the product seem to have done good. Often, the display shows attractive models taking the product. As such many people feel inclined to use the product as they feel that it will make them ‘cool’ as the model in the advert.

Tobacco faces many challenges to advertise. This is due to the high volume of information that is on the public domain of the dangers of use of tobacco products and the numerous anti- smoking campaign. Advertising tobacco adverts is therefore a complex affair as one needs to prove that they are not insensitive to the adverse effects likely to be caused by the uptake of tobacco. The matter is not made easier by the fact that this advertising is the most highly regulated form of marketing with strict laws in many countries of what cigarette advertisers can and cannot display.

One such advert appears on the fictional Winter1964 Scotch & Smoke magazine in the TV series Mad Men. The advert depicts the confident-looking protagonist Don Draper, smoking a cigarette and drinking. Behind him the words “People were buying cigarettes before Freud was born” in italics. Behind him are the words Don Draper, the Maverick of Madison Avenue in bold letters in the upper case. The advert is multi-colored and blends an array of colors to produce a highly attractive final product.

Since the man in the picture looks seems highly placed in the society, confident and

Sure of himself, the advert by extension suggests that tobacco smokers are people who are aware of who they are. The phenomenal words that people have been smoking since Sigmoid Freud try to depict smoking as part of culture. The words that introduce Don Draper as a Maverick, meaning a person who stands by what they believe even if they are alone. Such is the depiction of a smoker in the advert: Someone who is informed, well aware of their actions and who is decisive and takes the action they feel is right no matter what the world thinks.