Cigarette Ads: a Matter of Conscience : Doonesbury Strip Draws Ad Agency Creative Types Into Moral Fray Over Assignments
Doonesbury sometimes seems like the kind of guy whose most pressing problem is whether to lunch on Cajun chicken or duck sausage pizza. But the oh-so-hip comic strip character has spent the past two weeks wrestling with a question that delves--if not stabs--into the heart of the advertising business: Do people who create commercials have any conscience?
The answer, at least the one reached by Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau, won’t leave many advertising executives with whiter shirts or brighter teeth. Rather, it would seem to leave most with ring around the collar.
In the comic strip, the character Michael J. Doonesbury, who is employed as a copywriter at an ad agency, is asked by an R. J. Reynolds executive to create a print advertising campaign that will coax more young people to start smoking. What’s more, Doonesbury is led to believe that his very job at the agency depends on accepting the assignment.
After two weeks of soul-searching--including a dream sequence in which he invents an animated pitchman shaped like a cigarette--Doonesbury finally accepts the assignment. And this single decision seems to cast a pretty large shadow over the entire ad industry.
“There’s no shortage of people willing to go to work making ads for cigarette companies,” said John M. Connors Jr., president of the Boston ad firm Hill, Holliday, Connors, Cosmopulos, which creates ads for John Hancock and Wang. While his agency doesn’t handle any cigarette companies, he says it would at least consider it.
But has Doonesbury been presenting an accurate picture of the ad industry? Are ad agency workers sometimes asked to put their morals aside and work on advertising for products--like cigarettes or liquor--that they don’t condone? And if so, just how many refuse to work on projects for advertisers such as cigarette makers?
Well, how about one in five?
That, at least, is the case at one New York ad firm that creates advertising for Richland and Capri cigarettes, both made by Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. “About 20% of our people might not want to work on our cigarette account,” said Peter Geer, president of Geer, DuBois Inc., which also creates ads for Jaguar. “It’s a distinct minority,” Geer said of those who won’t create cigarette ads, “but it’s a significant number.”
And what happens if they don’t want to? Well, Geer said, they are simply assigned to a different client. At the same time, however, Geer said that before hiring new employees, his agency sometimes asks people if they would object to working on cigarette ad business. “But that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t hire them if they said yes,” he said.
Laurie Brandalise says she has turned down lucrative offers to create ads for tobacco products. But she is a free-lance copy writer based in Los Angeles. And she says it’s easier for her to say no than for many of her friends who work full time at agencies. “I have nothing to lose,” she said, “but they can lose their jobs.” Of course, many agencies have never faced this problem because they’ve never even had the opportunity to create ads for tobacco companies. That situation, however, can change almost over night.
And the biggest ad agency in the Los Angeles area, Chiat/Day, is facing that issue right now. In the past, the unwritten policy at Venice-based Chiat/Day was not to create cigarette advertising. But now, Chiat/Day, which creates ads for Nissan, is purchasing an Australian ad firm, Mojo MDA, that creates advertising overseas for a Philip Morris brand. So has Chiat/Day changed its tune on cigarette advertising? The company’s chairman, Jay Chiat, won’t say. “I have no comment on that,” he said.
Another Los Angeles ad executive, however, was willing to comment. “If it’s legal to sell something, it should be legal to advertise it,” said Patrick King, AC&R;/CCL Advertising Inc. King formerly worked for a large Australian firm that created ads for several cigarette brands.
But if someone at his agency has any moral problems working on a tobacco account--or any other account--they could just work on another, he said. And that is where the recent Doonesbury comic strip was off base, King said. “It’s message was totally not real in the world of advertising agencies,” he said.
Doonesbury creator Trudeau declined to be interviewed. But a spokesman for Universal Press Syndicate, the Kansas City, Mo., company that distributes the comic strip, said too many people take the comic strip literally. “I would hope that people don’t base their views of the ad world on a comic strip,” said Lee Salem, editorial director. “Remember, some of Trudeau’s favorite tools are exaggeration and hyperbole.”
Hyperbole or not, R. J. Reynolds executives are hardly humored by the strip. “The simple fact is, we don’t target our advertising to appeal to young people,” said David Fishel, vice president of public relations at Winston-Salem-based RJR Nabisco. “What’s more, advertising has almost nothing to do with anyone starting to smoke.”
Of course, not everyone buys that line. In fact, the chairman of one major New York ad agency is so certain that advertising can persuade kids to start smoking that his firm refuses to create ads for cigarettes. It will, however, create ads for non-tobacco products made by these companies. “We will never create any cigarette advertisements,” said Robert Schmidt, chairman of Levine, Huntley, Schmidt & Beaver. “There has to be some social conscience to an ad agency.”
That social conscience, however, must often expand beyond the issue of tobacco advertising, he said. Several years ago, Schmidt’s agency was among several chasing the $10 million in advertising business for the World Gold Council, which is primarily funded by South African gold mining companies. “We were really on the fence with this one,” said Schmidt, because many people at the ad firm had problems with the apartheid policy of racial segregation practiced in South Africa. “We backed out after our second meeting. It was a combination of conscience--and not falling in love with the people involved.”
But the ad firm does handle a substantial amount of advertising for E&J; Gallo Winery. And one of the its top art directors recently asked not to work on the account for religious reasons. “You have to honor that kind of thing,” Schmidt said. “Of course, if you’re a tiny agency and it’s the only copywriter in the joint who won’t work on a new piece of business, you’ve got a problem.”
N.Y. Daily News Pitch Using Yankee Slugger
What was ailing New York Yankee slugger Dave Winfield doing in Los Angeles the other day?
Not taking batting practice, that’s for sure. While recovering from recent back surgery, Winfield was in Los Angeles to star in several commercials for the New York Daily News that were filmed by Livingston 5 Inc., a Los Angeles production company. The spots will air continually in the New York market until Winfield returns to uniform.
The spots portray Winfield as keeping up with the Yankees only through reading the sports section of the Daily News. “The good news to my fans is, I’ll be back,” Winfield says in one spot. “The bad news to those other teams is, I’ll be back.”
Agency Covering Broad Field With New Clients
Ever wonder about the wide variety of advertisers handled by a single agency?
During the past several weeks, the Irvine-based firm AC&R;/CCL Advertising picked up five new accounts--totaling $15 million--that seem to indicate how varied the ad business can be. Its biggest new client is San Jose-based Samsung Information Systems America, which wants the agency to create a newspaper campaign about its personal computer systems. The firm also picked up Unitek/3M, one of the world’s largest makers of orthodontic products. And it also added a Tustin company called SMI, which sells drug abuse prevention products. “Los Angeles is alive and well as an advertising market,” said Patrick King, chairman of the agency’s West Coast office. “And so is Orange County.”
Ad’s Point: Boating’s Fun--Without Alcohol
The striking print advertisement shows a lone pleasure boat that looks as if it has been front-ended by a big rig on the San Diego Freeway. Above the picture is the headline: “Scotch and Water Don’t Mix.”
The ad will begin running just weeks after the Exxon Valdez oil tanker accident in Alaska, which involved a captain whose tests showed he was legally intoxicated. The campaign, which was created by the Los Angeles office of Hakuhodo Advertising, breaks this month in such magazines as Boating, Yachting and Outdoor Life. The campaign was underwritten by Hakuhodo’s client, the Marine division of American Suzuki Motor Corp., which makes outboard motors.
There’s some eerie reality in the ad, too. The boat pictured in the ad was pulled from a Los Angeles boat yard after it was involved in an accident, said Louis Vega, vice president at Hakuhodo. Some 600 people are involved annually in alcohol-related boating fatalities. Two, he said, were killed in that boat.
