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That year, the Tobacco Institute and the Committee for Tobacco Research (as it was then known) disbanded in accordance with a lawsuit settlement.American TV series or program Your Hit Parade Still, tobacco companies continued to maintain, through their research committee, that there was still a “controversy” over whether cigarettes were unhealthy until 1998. Surgeon General’s report that smoking causes lung cancer, laryngeal cancer and chronic bronchitis. Doctors were coming out against cigarettes, culminating in 1964 with the U.S. Therefore, the companies were forming a research committee to investigate the issue.Īfter this, cigarette ads stopped featuring doctors because this was no longer a convincing tactic. In 1954, these companies released “A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers” arguing that research showing a link between cancer and smoking was alarming but not conclusive. “What happens is, all the different cigarette companies kind of work together to try to promote the idea that…we don’t know yet if it’s harmful,” Gardner says. Reynolds Tobacco Company.īy the mid-1950s, when tobacco companies had to confront good evidence that their products caused lung cancer, advertising strategies started to shift.

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In 1946, Reynolds launched an ad campaign with the slogan, “More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.” They’d solicited this “finding” by giving doctors a free carton of Camel cigarettes, and then asking what brand they smoked.ġ946 cigarette advertisement launched by R.J.

Reynolds began paying for research and then citing it in its ads like Philip Morris. Reynolds Tobacco Company created a Medical Relations Division and advertised it in medical journals. “So framing it that way seems like it’ll help appeal to people.” “The American public is thinking about medicine in such a positive way and science in a positive way,” says Gardner, who co-authored an American Journal of Public Health article about doctors in cigarette ads. Philip Morris continued to advertise “studies” it sponsored through the 1940s, the decade that saw the introduction of penicillin. In 1937, the Philip Morris company took that one step forward with a Saturday Evening Post ad claiming doctors had conducted a study showing “when smokers changed to Philip Morris, every case of irritation cleared completely and definitely improved.” What it didn’t mention was that Philip Morris had sponsored those doctors.

Unsurprisingly, many doctors responded positively to this biased, leading question, and Lucky Strike ads used their answers to imply their cigarettes must be medically better for your throat. To get this number, the company’s ad agency had sent physicians cartons of Lucky Strike cigarettes and a letter asking if they thought Lucky Strikes were “less irritating to sensitive and tender throats than other cigarettes,” while noting “a good many people” had already said they were.ġ937 Philip Morris advertisement claiming their brand cleared up irritation of the nose and throat. In 1930, it published an ad claiming “20,679 Physicians say ‘LUCKIES are less irritating’” to the throat. The first cigarette company to use physicians in their ads was American Tobacco, maker of Lucky Strikes. It wasn’t all cigarettes that gave you problems-it was just those other ones. But companies used this to their advantage to promote their product as better than the competition. Yes, cigarettes did cause coughing and throat irritation. “People noticed that and were worried about it, but that didn’t mean they knew it was cigarettes.” “People started to get worried in the ‘40s because lung cancer was spiking the lung cancer death rate was going through the roof,” says Martha Gardner, a history and social sciences professor at Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences.