Toscani made his comments at a meeting in Geneva, where the WHO was meeting to talk about ways of bringing in a new treaty on tobacco controls. He called for an advertising ban and said he would use his creative talents to create anti-tobacco advertising.
Toscani, who made the innocuous Italian fashion brand Benetton famous by his use of controversial images in its advertising, used the same tactics as he told the WHO meeting that being a smoker was like being in a modern-day concentration camp.
"Being a smoker is like being in a concentration camp. Smoking is an expression of slavery and, like all slaves, smokers want to be free. The only difference between these concentration camps and World War II's is that these ones can advertise. Compared with what tobacco companies are doing now, the Nazis were amateurs."
He drove his speech home by presenting to the conference with a poster behind him, entitled 'Smoker's Body Profile' and which showed graphically the effect smoking can have on a person's body.
Toscani quit Benetton in May 2000 after 18 years as its creative director. One of his last campaigns to stir up trouble was the campaign featuring photographs of 26 convicts on Death Row. The January 2000 campaign caused outrage around the world and lost Benetton a lucrative contract with the US department store chain Sears Roebuck.
Benetton, which has never hired an advertising agency, spent less than £1m a year on advertising but managed its press and poster campaigns through Toscani, provoking enough controversy to earn the company vast amounts of publicity through press coverage.
Other Toscani campaigns for Benetton included images of a dying Aids victim, the blood-stained uniform of a dead soldier, and a new-born baby still covered in amniotic fluid with its umbilical chord intact.
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