Ad Campaign Gets Fired Up : Proposition 99: Anti-smoking spots on radio and television will be aimed at preteens, minorities and women. It will be the largest such campaign in U.S. history.

California’s tobacco-tax initiative, which already has cut into cigarette sales in the state, is about to finance a fresh assault on the smoking habit.

Radio and TV spots paid for by Proposition 99 tax revenues are to begin in March, targeting preteens, minorities and pregnant women in the largest anti-smoking advertising campaign in U.S. history.

The $28.6 million earmarked for the 18-month campaign is a fraction of what cigarette makers spend promoting their brands, but it far exceeds earlier efforts by state and federal health agencies.

“For somebody who is in the field of health education, it’s probably one of the most exciting things that could happen,” said Dearell Niemeyer, chief of local programs for the state Department of Health Services’ newly created Tobacco Control Section.

Dr. Ronald Davis, director of the federal Office on Smoking and Health, a part of the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control, said the California program will outstrip all previous anti-smoking media campaigns.

Davis said federal agencies are spending only about $1 million per year on anti-smoking advertising.

Only one other state, Minnesota, earmarks cigarette tax revenues for anti-smoking ads. The state’s budget for the program is about $1 million a year, said Kathleen Harty, head of the Minnesota health department’s section for nonsmoking and health.

Besides production and placement of radio, television, print and billboard ads, the $28.6-million California campaign also will be used for market research on effective ways to reach target groups.

“In a business where you get routinely to work on the socially trivial, it’s kind of exciting to work on the socially significant,” said Leonard Pearlstein, a partner in keye/donna/pearlstein, the ad agency chosen last month by state health officials to run the media campaign.

Proposition 99 increased the cigarette tax by 25 cents a pack on Jan. 1 of last year, triggering a strong decline in sales. During the first nine months of 1989, cigarette sales in California slipped 14% below the same period of 1988, according to the State Board of Equalization.

Since many smokers stocked up on their favorite brands before the tax took effect, the real long-term decline may be closer to 10%, board officials said. But even that represents a sharp drop in cigarette sales, which had been falling in the state by only 1% to 2% per year during most of the 1980s.

Further thinning the ranks of smokers is the goal of the media campaign, the most controversial segment of a broader educational program to be financed by the cigarette tax increase, which voters passed in November, 1988.

Altogether, about $221 million is to be spent through June, 1991, on the anti-smoking program, Niemeyer said.

The tobacco industry spent more than $20 million in its unsuccessful bid to defeat Proposition 99. The industry then tried and failed last September to delete funds for the media campaign from state legislation allocating the cigarette tax revenues.

Although critical of the media campaign, tobacco-industry officials said they are not planning efforts to counter it.

Steven Weiss, manager of media relations for Philip Morris USA, contended that the campaign may violate the First Amendment rights of smokers, since they are being made to “pay for speech against something that they’ve chosen to do.”

The industry’s concern about the ads reflects its experience during the “Fairness Doctrine” era of the late 1960s, when anti-smoking messages hit the airwaves and per capita sales of cigarettes suddenly began to drop.

In 1967, after the Federal Communications Commission ruled that the Fairness Doctrine applied to cigarette advertising, free air-time became available for counter-advertising by health groups.

One ad featured William Talman, a heavy smoker who played Perry Mason’s legal adversary on television and who later died of lung cancer at the age of 53. Appearing very ill, Talman said he did not mind the courtroom defeats, but that he was “in a battle right now I don’t want to lose. . . . Take some advice about smoking and losing from someone who’s been doing both for years. . . . Don’t be a loser.”

At their peak, the anti-smoking messages got about one minute of air time for every three minutes of cigarette ads, studies showed. But, reversing decades of steady growth, nationwide per capita cigarette sales dropped in four straight years from 1967-70, according to the 1989 Surgeon General’s report.

Health groups, which had campaigned for years for a ban on broadcast cigarette advertising, found themselves with a new ally: In a seemingly gracious and diplomatic gesture, the cigarette makers caved in and backed legislation in Congress that threw them off the air after 1970.

But when cigarette ads vanished from the airwaves, so did most of the countering ads--and per capita sales immediately resumed their historic rise before turning downward again later in the 1970s.

The impact of those early no-smoking spots was one of the most compelling arguments for California’s media campaign, said Niemeyer of the state Tobacco Control Section.

State officials estimate that about 25% of Californians 18 years of age and older are smokers, less than the national rate of about 28%.

Still, Californians bought more than 2 billion packs of cigarettes last year, and health officials say smoking remains the state’s leading preventable cause of death and disease, accounting for $4.1 billion in direct health-care costs in 1985.

According to the Federal Trade Commission, the tobacco industry spends nearly $2.6 billion per year on promotion and advertising--perhaps one-tenth of that in California, although there are no state-by-state figures.

Mark Pertschuk, executive director of the Berkeley-based Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights, said the $28.6-million anti-smoking campaign “is not an enormous amount of money in the land of California radio and television. . . . I hope we see radio stations and television stations increasing the power of this campaign with some donated and discounted media time,” he said.

Besides the ad campaign, tobacco tax revenues are expected to supply about $70 million to the schools and $70 million to local health departments for anti-smoking education, and about $53 million worth of grants to health and community groups involved in tobacco control. Hundreds of millions of dollars more are going to the counties for health care for the poor and other programs.

Niemeyer--who said his father started smoking at the age of 13 and died of lung cancer at 49--said the anti-smoking message will focus partly on youth, since 90% of all people who smoke take up the habit in their teens. He said preteens are a target audience because they are in the process of deciding “whether to experiment with cigarettes or not.”

Minority groups also will be targeted, because they tend to smoke more and suffer higher rates of smoking-related cancer and heart disease, Niemeyer said.

Other spots aimed at pregnant women could have the “most immediate impact,” Niemeyer said, because not smoking during pregnancy pays quickly by lowering the risk of a low-birth-weight baby and other health complications. Expectant mothers, out of concern for their infants, also are more receptive to the anti-smoking message, he said.

Niemeyer said he is concerned, however, that the massive effort will spawn unrealistic hopes among lawmakers and health groups.

“The expectations are high, as they should be when we have this amount of resource,” he said. “But changing behavior doesn’t happen overnight.”