Cigarette advertising disappears after a century of what was described in 北京赛车pk10 as relentless and often classic advertising. The ban on press and posters goes the same way as television advertising, which disappeared in 1965.
Cigarette companies have been marking the occasion with special advertisements. Silk Cut, famous for its long-running series of ads featuring its distinctive purple colour and various witty visual puns on its name, has come out with a "fat lady sings" poster and press ad, created by cdp-travissully.
The ad ran as a double-page spread in 北京赛车pk10, with a separate page thanking people involved over the years in the campaign, including Gallaher's Christine Barrass.
Lambert & Butler, which has run a long-term campaign featuring a raffish toff, Lambert, and his butler, celebrated with two different spots. One featured the faces of the two main characters pixilated out, 'Crimewatch'-style, with Lambert proclaiming: "It seems we've been outlawed".
A second spot features Lambert carrying a packet of King Size cigarettes, saying "It's a good buy from me", while the butler answers "And it's goodbye from us". A homage to the tagline of the comedians 'The Two Ronnies', Ronnies Barker and Corbett. The company had used Mustoes on creative and Initiative Media for media.
Other long-running campaigns to bite the dust are the "Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet", which had still been running in cinemas. The campaign was one of the best known in British advertising
Gallaher was forced to launch an intensive advertising campaign for Benson & Hedges Silver before the product was even available, so it could beat the ban.
The British Lung Foundation says that the ban on cigarette advertising will stop 120,000 smoking-related deaths every year. However, the pro-smokers rights group Forest said that it was a "pointless political gesture".
However, it is widely thought that the best creative and often surreal work dates from the late 70s and came out of Gallaher's roster agencies Collett Dickenson Pearce and Saatchi & Saatchi and is commonly described as surreal.
However, some disagree. A collection of the best work recently appeared in 北京赛车pk10:
B&H "BIRDCAGE" 1978
One of the CDP ads which pioneered the "surreal" approach to tobacco advertising. Benson & Hedges had been launched as a luxury king-size cigarette.
Its pack was stylish but sales were miniscule. John Ritchie, CDP's tobacco account "baron", and Gallaher agreed a complete break with its advertising past was needed. Alan Waldie, the brains behind the "pure gold" campaign, remembers the stunned silence when it was presented to the account team but also Gallaher's instant enthusiasm for the idea with one proviso -- "great art direction, great photography, spare no expense". The rest is history.
STRAND 1957
It was the most enduring cigarette campaign of the last 50 years. Alas, S H Benson's "You're never alone with a Strand" TV commercial for Strand cigarettes was also the most disasterous. It featured a lonely soul with trilby and trenchcoat collar turned up walking rainsoaked city streets at dead of night. Even in the relatively unsophisticated 50s, smokers could recognise a sad bastard when they saw one and Strand rapidly disappeared from the market. Yet so enduring was the image that 32 years later Saatchi & Saatchi produced a spoof of the film to take Vodafone on to TV for the first time. And people still whistle its moody soundtrack.
B&H "IGUANA" 1978
For a long time CDP's enigmatic ad for B&H featuring a sequence of unrelated objects travelling through the Arizona desert and concluding outside Battersea power station remained in the Guinness Book of Records as the most expensive commercial ever made. Art directed by the legendary Alan Waldie, written by Mike Cozens and directed by Hugh "Chariots of Fire" Hudson, the ad deliberately thumbed its nose at tobacco ad restrictions with its obscure images. Nobody knew what possible connection there could be between a helicopter, an iguana, a sardine can and a pack of B&H. And nobody ever will.
HAMLET "PHOTO BOOTH" 1987
The fact that four out of ten cigars sold in the UK are Hamlets is testimony to the durability of a brand which was built through TV advertising but has not been seen there since the EC banished it from the medium in 1991. All the charming little visual comedy vignettes ran in tandem with Jacques Loussier's playing of Bach's Air on a G String. And none was funnier than the one featuring Gregor Fisher, of Rab C Nesbitt fame, struggling to keep his Bobby Charlton hairdo and his dignity intact while getting his picture taken. The CDP creatives Rowan Dean, Phillip Differ and Garry Horner devised the commercial, which Graham Rose directed.
SILK CUT "SCISSORS" 1988
The campaign for Gallaher's Silk Cut, conceived in 1984 by Saatchi & Saatchi's Jeremy Sinclair and Paul Arden,and based on a simple idea of scissors sything through silk, was a clever response to the growing constraints on tobacco advertising. This execution, art directed by Alex Taylor, was also a perfect summation of Charles Saatchi's creative philosophy of brutal simplicity. Simon Dicketts, now M&C Saatchi's executive creative director, who worked on the campaign at Charlotte Street, says: "Charles told us to keep doing the ads until people got the hang of the idea and never to get clever with them. They were simple, right and completely focused."
REGAL "REG" 1993
The campaign for Imperial's Regal cigarette brand provided a brash and noisy interlude to the subtle and enigmatic tobacco advertising that had proceeded it. Bursting onto posters came Reg, a fat, balding character with his own line in saloon bar philosophy. There was Reg on party politics ("If you drop ash on the carpet you won't get invited again"), Reg on the meaning of life ("Depends if you get time off for good behaviour") and Reg on train spotting ("There's one"). Lowe Howard-Spink circumvented the rules about cigarettes not appealing to young people by successfully arguing that Reg was repulsive and "uncool". However, his gross antics ensured his rapid promotion to cult status with Viz readers.
B&H SMALL CIGARS "ISTANBUL" 1974
CDP's "Istanbul" ad for B&H small cigars has been hailed as one of the best TVads of all time. The ad, directed by BFCS's Bob Brooks, confirmed his place as a pioneer in bringing real film quality to a piece of broadcast advertising. Written by Lindsey Dale, it features George Cole as a seedy spy who sees his pilfered atomic secrets go up in smoke through a case of mistaken identity. Tony Brignull, a former CDP senior creative, says: "If somebody had brought that script to me I would have said it was too complicated to make. But Brooks made it work beautifully. Everybody gets it and everybody laughs."
CONDOR "SUBMARINE" 1985
Peter Levelle, CDP's one-time head of TV, directed this version of a series of ads for Condor pipe tobacco with its line "Nothing should disturb that Condor moment". The Condor smoker began life as a very sad chap indeed. When CDP took over the account, it kept the slogan but showed the character with an anarchic streak beneath his calm exterior. In this film, he calls up his radio-controlled mini submarine to torpedo the model powerboat with which a couple of yobs are shattering his pond-side peace.
THE MARLBORO COWBOY 1955
Philip Morris seized on the image of the stubbled cowboy with a cigarette dangling from his lip when it sought to reposition Marlboro as a smoke for men rather than women. The brainchild of Don Tennant at Leo Burnett in Chicago, the cowboy is considered partly responsible for changing the US ideal of male beauty personified at the time by stars such as Tyrone Power. Tennant was smart enough to realise that "there were a lot more guys who looked like me". Today, one out of every four cigarettes smoked is a Marlboro and the surroundings are so ingrained in the world's imagination that people ask their travel agents about tours to Marlboro Country.
MANIKIN "SHEER ENJOYMENT" 1976
This Ted Bates TV ad isn't only an uninhibited throwback to a time before political correctness, but a seminal example of advertising with "bloke" appeal. In pre-Baywatch days, the ads were a "must see" for a generation of youths while provoking the ire of women's rights groups who condemned them as "irrelevant". The films featured either T-shirted girls cavorting in the surf or scantily-clad beauties sensually stroking tobacco leaves while purring about the special flavour of Manikin cigars.
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