Pack Of Lies

University of Massachusetts instructor and media critic Jean Kilbourne and Richard W. Pollay, who teaches advertising and marketing management at the University of British Columbia, present a powerful indictment of the cigarette advertising industry in this filmed lecture to a group of students. What might have been a dry talking heads video is actually quite interesting due to the expertise of the speakers, the copious use of graphics, and the excellent editing of the program. Beginning with the disturbing statistics that tobacco is linked to the deaths of 400,000 Americans each year, the program is divided into seven segments: "Addiction, Death, and Profits," "Market Strategy," "Reassuring Smokers," "Targeting Kids, ""Exploiting Anxieties: Targeting Women," "Media Censorship," and "Action." Using examples from over 80 advertisements as well as quotes from corporate documents from the tobacco industry, Kilbourne and Pollay make a strong case disputing the tobacco industry's reputed target audience of current adult smokers looking to switch. Switchers only constitute about 10% of the overall market (hardly justifying the $3 billion spent in advertising each year by the industry). The target audience, by and large, is composed mainly of kids and women. An illustrative example is the notably phallic "Old Joe" cartoon camel used in the Camel campaign. Prior to the "Old Joe" campaign, less than 1% of smokers under the age of 18 smoked Camels. Since the introduction of the cartoon camel, that figure has risen to an astonishing 33%. Equally alarming is Virginia Slims recent campaigns with their not so subtle link between smoking and weight control--Kilbourne points out that while smoking in males is on the slight decrease, it's rising among females, no doubt partly because of these "image" campaigns by the makers of Virginia Slims. Although we take for granted the pictures of young, healthy smokers in cigarette advertisements, we may not often enough stop to examine the gap between the picture and the reality. Kilbourne and Pollay simply demonstrate that people--and especially young people--should not be drawn in by extremely misleading advertisements. Too, we mustn't underestimate the power of the tobacco industry--when Newsweek and Redbook, which both carry cigarette advertising, run cover stories on cancer and cutting the risks of cancer, respectively, and neither story even mentions cigarettes, I think it's safe to say that R.J. Reynolds has some monetary pull. Although not an anti-smoking tape per se (such as the excellent, and much lower-priced Butt Out: The Proven Quit Smoking Plan, reviewed in our July-August 1992 issue), Pack of Lies could certainly be a deterrent to young people who are thinking about starting to smoke. Highly recommended. (Available from: The Foundation for Media Education, 26 Center St., Northampton, MA 01060; (413) 586-4170.)