The curling smoke of Lucky Strikes was just a part of growing up in our home.
The acrid wafts drifted up, the variety of ashtrays lay here and there, and fancy aluminum lighters had to be filled with a special can of lighter fluid.
Once as a boy, when I had a bad earache, my dad carefully blew smoke in my ear, having read somewhere that this would help. It didn’t.
We didn’t know it, but the culture of smoking in the western world had been aggressively built up over the years.
Virginia Slims commercials have been famous for linking smoking to women’s liberation. But the ads in the 1960s and onward were not the first attempt to exploit a movement.
Edward Bernays, the founder of modern public relations (and no relation to me), got women to smoke as part of a campaign for one of his clients in the 1920s. He recruited liberation-minded women in New York to break taboos and create a scandal by lighting up cigarettes during the Easter Sunday Parade in 1929. News photographers snapped pictures, and the rest is history.
The sneaky thing is that the women themselves were not even aware that they were being used as pawns by the American Tobacco Company, which hired Bernays.
And the Marlboro Man, with cowboy hat or rugged climbing gear, showed the guys that smoking is manly.
We expect a salesman to sport some hype. But how much is good?
Who can resist these email subject lines:
Suzy’s five secrets to boost your __________.
The day I told my boss, “I’m _______.”
Three common mistakes that will destroy your ________.”
Public relations and advertising are powerful. Can there be any honesty in this field? How do you know when you’ve crossed the line from hype to lies?
