Joe Camel an Adults-Only Party Animal, Creator Says

Mike Salisbury has watched the public fracas over smokin’ Joe Camel and his appeal to kids for years now.

He wasn’t going to say anything. Then, a friend and fellow trustee at the Orange County Museum of Art urged him to talk about his key role in developing the Ray-Banned, be-humped one. As the person who put pen to paper to help create the well-known if widely reviled icon, Salisbury’s voice had been absent from the debate.

It’s a cinch to imagine how anti-smokers figure it went:

R.J. Reynolds execs, desperate to boost Camel sales, invite admen over. The room’s full of smoke and chicanery.

R.J.R. guys: “Look, the Marlboro man’s killin’ us. But we got this idea. We start marketing to kids. Kids don’t smoke enough. Kids don’t smoke enough Camels. What can you do for us?”

Ad men: “Kids? We can give you kids. Uh . . . how about an animal? Kids love animals. Furry animals. Furry cartoon animals. Kids love cartoons. We’ve done studies. Why, we’ll use a camel! And we’ll make him cool--call him Joe Camel. Teens’ll love that. When do we begin?”

R.J.R.: “Yesterday.”

In real life, Salisbury, says, “there was never any mention of kids.” As the commercial art designer on the Camel account in the late 1980s, he says he was told repeatedly by the ad agency that hired him that activities in which Joe took part must not have particular appeal to youths.

The intent of the campaign, he says, was simply to increase Camel’s market share by attracting smokers away from industry leader Marlboro.

Salisbury--currently of Rolling Hills, formerly of Laguna Beach--says he has no connection to the tobacco company and hasn’t worked on the account for seven years. During the four years he spent on the account, Salisbury says he was paid $1 million by his ad agency employers.

When the campaign was being developed, anyone hired to model for his Camel ads--and every character in every ad was based on a human model--had to be 25 or older.

A spiky-hair punk Joe playing guitar was among umpteen efforts rejected by the company.

“They said, ‘Nope, too young,’ ” Salisbury recalls. “They rejected anything that had a tendency to skew a little young. We were constantly trying new ideas.”

One more thing, he says: He never intended the face to be seen as a phallic image, as some critics contend. “People read all this stuff into it,” he says.

R.J. Reynolds has repeatedly denied critics’ claims that Joe was created to target youth. The cigarette maker is fighting a lawsuit over such charges. And, as part of a new federal initiative to curb teen smoking, Joe may soon be forced out of public sight.

One study cited by the Department of Health and Human Resources found that 30% of 3-year-olds and 91% of 6-year-olds could identify “Joe Camel” as a symbol of smoking.

In August, President Clinton ordered the Food and Drug Administration to begin regulating cigarette advertising and sales to curb underage smoking. If tobacco industry efforts fail to overturn the order, it could mean curtains for the smoking, smirking golden dromedary who has been depicted gambling, shooting pool and cruising with the car top down.

Under the new FDA regulations, most tobacco ads--on billboards and in publications with significant youth readership--would be reduced to black and white, text-only messages. No more Joe-like images except in adults-only facilities such as bars.

“With this historic action that we are taking today,” the president proclaimed, “Joe Camel and the Marlboro man will be out of our children’s reach forever.”

Says R.J. Reynolds spokeswoman Peggy Carter: “If we believed Joe Camel caused children to smoke, nobody would have to tell us to pull the campaign. We’d do it ourselves.”

The lawsuit against the use of Joe Camel in advertising--one of many pending against the $50-billion tobacco industry--was filed by a San Francisco woman in 1991 and is expected to come to trial next year. It was filed on behalf of all California residents and alleges that Reynolds targeted minors with Joe. Patrick Coughlin, the attorney suing Reynolds, said Salisbury “may not be lying one lick. But do I believe that [Reynolds] knew what they were doing? Absolutely.”

Salisbury, 50, the father of two, quit smoking 20 years ago. He has won many advertising industry awards. He surfs, rides motorcycles and looks so much like Dennis Hopper that he played the actor’s double in “Apocalypse Now.”

He runs a communications agency that bears his name out of a modest Torrance office crowded with colorful posters and whatnot he’s created.

He coined the name 501 jeans for Levi Strauss, helped transform Rolling Stone from a tabloid into a slick-cover magazine, worked for Playboy and Disneyland, styled video packaging for director du jour Quentin Tarantino and designed ad campaigns for such films as “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Aliens” and “Jurassic Park.”

His successes led the McCann Erickson ad agency to Salisbury’s door in 1986: Would he come to work with them on the Camel account?

While Salisbury was developing a new look for the brand’s ad campaign, Reynolds had other designers at work on the account. The first version of Joe that Americans saw, in 1988, was designed by a North Carolina agency as part of a special 75th anniversary promotion and used an image based on an old French illustration, according to Reynolds spokeswoman Carter. But it was Salisbury who made Joe “cool”--his work “was very instrumental early on in the campaign,” Carter says.

Nobody disputes that Joe was Reynolds’ best effort to get Marlboro smokers to switch. The curly blond man then hawking Camels couldn’t hold a match to the Marlboro man. McCann asked Salisbury for ads featuring 1940s-style action-film figures, types who always seemed to be smoking.

“They thought these heroes from early movies, very masculine kind of guys in these same adventurous situations [as Marlboro’s cowboy], would do the trick,” Salisbury says.

But Salisbury’s early ads, such as a Gregory Peck look-alike beside a Curtis P-40 War Hawk jet, was a focus group dud, he says.

“So we took the same idea, but put the head of a camel on this person’s body,” picturing camel-cum-hero as private detective or adventurer a la “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

But those didn’t fly either. The muted colors, as well as such youth-oriented scenes as a guitar-playing Joe, also forced Salisbury to keep trying. (Since then, ads with a guitar-playing camel have appeared, but they picture Joe in a nightclub, an ‘age-restricted” adult environment acceptable to Reynolds, Carter says.)

After three years, Salisbury finally got the go-ahead. His successful Joe incorporated Sean Connery’s expressive eyebrows and the hip hairstyle and Ray-Bans that Don Johnson wore in “Miami Vice.”

“We had him as a guy in a tux in Las Vegas,” he says, “in a tux in a James Bond situation.” Styling Joe after Johnson, “who was obviously a 30-year-old guy,” Salisbury adds, “was a real conscious effort to make him look that age.”

Thereafter, it was full steam ahead. Salisbury stayed with the account (which moved to other agencies) until there was little need for concept development, the specialty he’d been honing since designing Surfer magazine in Laguna Beach, an early job where he supervised Rick Griffin, a top surf-comics artist of the ‘60s and his onetime roommate.

“Basically, we’d taken the brand image, the symbol for these cigarettes and did something different with it,” Salisbury says. “It’s not much different than if you took Aunt Jemima and had her move.”

The uproar over Joe peaked after Salisbury was no longer involved with it, he says. But he admits to guilt pangs and second thoughts.

Sometimes he thinks, “ ‘Oh God, maybe I went too far,’ ” he says. “The money was fine and all, but maybe through karma I’ll end up paying for all this.”

The federal government has reported that before Joe existed, an estimated 3% of teenage smokers preferred Camel above other cigarette brands. Five years later, the government reports, Camel’s market share among teens more than quadrupled to 13%.

Reynolds, the nation’s second-largest cigarette company, disputes those figures but does say Joe succeeded in stopping an erosion of Camel’s market share to keep it steady at 4.3%. The most recent figures available show Camel’s share at 4.7%, compared with Marlboro at 31.5%, according to the Maxwell Consumer Report, which tracks such sales.

“I did the job I was hired to do,” Salisbury says. And, he adds, he does not believe that Joe actually causes youths to light up, an opinion echoed by the Federal Trade Commission. In 1994, the FTC declined to ban Joe Camel ads, saying there was not enough evidence to prove the campaign caused underage smoking.

“You haven’t persuaded anybody to do anything,” Salisbury says. “You think people look at Joe Camel and think ‘I should look like an animal smoking a cigarette?’ No. You’ve created identification, brand awareness.”

Images in films and fashion, on the other hand, may deserve some blame, he says.

“You want to emulate the people you aspire to be like,” he says. “When I was younger, everybody wanted to smoke because James Dean smoked. A couple of weeks ago I saw ‘Desperately Seeking Susan,’ and Madonna reaches into her bag and takes out a pack of cigarettes, and I thought, ‘What year was that made?’ [1985] And the new Vogue must have five pages of editorial photography [shot by the magazine, not by advertisers] and almost all the models are smoking.”

Still, would he do it all over again?

“Well, I don’t know,” he says. “Today’s a different era. Unfortunately, the government has taken a funny position--obviously for political purposes. They’ve said cigarettes are not good for you and they want [to curb] advertising, but they say you can sell them, so what are people supposed to think? That the government’s only half serious?”