Tobacco Wars : Harlem Activists Unleash Stinging New Subway Ad Campaign

Anti-smoking activists in Harlem are once again giving tobacco companies fits. But this time around they’re not illegally whitewashing cigarette billboards as they did last year. Instead, they have posted stinging anti-smoking ads in every subway car in New York City. Legally. The ads feature a cowboy skeleton--eerily symbolic of the Marlboro man--lighting a cigarette that is dangling from the lips of a black youngster. “They used to make us pick it,” says the caption. “Now they want us to smoke it.”

This graphic ad is the most recent in a series of surprisingly successful steps that activist groups have taken to force tobacco and some alcoholic beverage companies to remove their billboard ads from Harlem.

Billboard whitewashing last year received intense media attention and forced tobacco makers to back off from posting ads near churches, hospitals and schools. And picketing outside tobacco company headquarters also drew media interest that at least temporarily embarrassed some tobacco firms.

While a special 25-cent tax on cigarettes underwrites a successful anti-smoking campaign in California, there is no such state funding in New York state. Indeed, California has a new anti-smoking TV ad campaign scheduled for later this fall.

Meanwhile, the most recent anti-smoking subway ad campaign in New York City--sponsored by the National Black Leadership Initiative on Cancer and Harlem Hospital--is drawing the attention of the most important audience of all: consumers.

So infatuated are commuters with these anti-smoking ads that they are stealing them from subways in record numbers. About 6,000 signs were posted two weeks ago, and since then almost every one of them has had to be replaced--many of them twice.

“In New York City, the best way to tell how good an ad campaign is is to find out how many (ads) are stolen from the subways,” said Joe Cherner, president of SmokeFree Educational Services, a nonprofit group that supports the campaign. What’s more, he added: “Any time the tobacco industry is upset about something you do, you know you’re doing something effective.”

But the tobacco companies insist that this latest ad campaign is ineffective and misdirected.

“This won’t have any effect at all,” said Brennan Dawson, spokeswoman for the Washington-based Tobacco Institute. “The ad campaign takes us back to the argument that blacks smoke more than whites. It might make for a good story, but it isn’t true.”

(A recent report from the Centers for Disease Control estimates that 26.2% of black adults say they are smokers, compared to 25.6% of white adults.)

Harold P. Freeman, the man behind this latest campaign, said blacks are not only the heaviest smokers, but they also suffer the highest rates of smoking-related cancer in the country. As head of surgery for the last 25 years at Harlem Hospital, Freeman said he has special insights into how blacks suffer disproportionately from smoking-related cancers.

“Tobacco smoking is the No. 1 cause of death among adults in the Harlem community,” Freeman said. “The tobacco companies are selling death. And we can’t stand any more unnecessary death in Harlem. We suffer enough of that here.”

Unlike California, where taxes on cigarettes are used to fund anti-smoking ads, New York has no such law. The anti-smoking ad campaign through the California Department of Health Services was suspended shortly after Gov. Pete Wilson took office in 1990. But a court order has put the campaign back in motion, and TV ads primarily aimed at teen-agers will start airing again next month, said Jacquolyn Duerr, who oversees the campaign for the department.

Last year, the health department’s ads generally portrayed the tobacco companies as ruthless villains. The next round of ads are expected to hammer out that same image.

Most teen-agers--unaware of the addictive qualities of tobacco--say they expect to quit smoking some day, said Duerr. The state’s upcoming TV ads will attempt to inform teen-agers how tobacco companies try to addict them to tobacco. The campaign will also tell young women how tobacco companies prey on their insecurities by linking smoking with such vanities as keeping slim.

“Instead of concentrating on the behavior of smokers, our ads are about the behavior of tobacco companies,” said Paul Keye, chairman of the Venice agency Livingston & Keye, which creates the campaign’s general market ads. “People don’t smoke to get cancer. They smoke because of the set of illusions tobacco advertising creates for them.”

The ads have certainly had some impact. During the 18 months they ran, the number of smokers in California decreased, according to state health officials. The caption to the New York subway ad campaign was borrowed from an anti-smoking ad that ran on TV in California.

While tobacco companies spend about $3 billion annually to lure consumers with their products, anti-smoking groups spend a fraction of that warning consumers of the dangers of tobacco.

Even then, the anti-smoking groups often face a tough time getting their public service ads posted. After all, billboard and transit companies depend on cigarette advertisers for much of their income. Gannett Outdoor, which posts all subway ads in New York City, refused to run the anti-smoking ad for a year. It relented only weeks after the city’s transit operator voted to ban tobacco ads beginning in 1993.

Gannett officials insist that their decision to run the ad was unrelated to that action.

One big fan of the current subway campaign is the Rev. Calvin O. Butts, a Harlem activist whose church members have whitewashed more than 300 tobacco and liquor billboards in Harlem.

“We don’t like to engage in civil disobedience,” said Butts, “but they leave us little alternative.”

Briefly . . .

Mexicana Airlines has handed its estimated $15-million North American ad account--now handled by J. Walter Thompson/LA--to the Los Angeles office of McCann-Erickson. . . . Renee Fraser, who last year was fired as general manager of Bozell’s Los Angeles office, has opened her own Mid-Wilshire agency, Fraser & Associates, with $12 million in billings. . . . BBDO/Los Angeles has won the $3-million ad business for the Southern California Cable Marketing Council. . . . Hilton Hotels of Los Angeles says it will name an agency for its $15-million ad business on Sept. 9. . . . Lord, Dentsu & Partners of Los Angeles has won the ad business for Best Western International, except for media planning, which will be handled in-house. . . . The struggling Los Angeles office of Della Femina McNamee will soon operate independently or with a new name under parent Euro RSCG. . . . Adtec Marketing of Los Angeles has won the ad account for Sync Research, an Irvine computer company.