Chris Harrald - The Cigarette Book: The History and Culture of Smoking

Cigarettes are inseparably intertwined with advertising and are the most spectacular proof of its efficacy. Across the world cigarette companies have made their advertising agencies rich, while the advertising agencies have made the cigarette companies even richer.

It is with the launch of Camel in 1913, and R. J. Reynoldss singleminded high-budget plugging of the brand that the idea of an advertising campaign was born. The word campaign with its implications of battles and war was highly appropriate to the fierce competition that was soon to consume the tobacco companies.

It could be said that, however successful the advertising, much of it amounted to no more than hyperbole and ingenious suggestion. Yet there is a profound skill in playing with words in a way that catches peoples imaginations.

Its toasted, claimed Lucky, to enormous effect, splendidly ignoring the fact that so was the tobacco of every other brand. George J. Whelan, a leading distributor of tobacco products in the 1920s, and former cigarette manufacturer, observed: There is no secret about cigarette making. Anyone can analyze a Camel and manufacture it. But that wasnt the point. The users would say it was not the same. Such is the power of advertising.

The public must be given ideas as to what it should like, and it is quite surprising sometimes how the public is sold on what might look [...] like the brainchild of a demented person...

An analyst writing in Advertising and Selling in 1936 observed:

You know a large part of the public doesnt really know what it wants. Our big task in recent years has been to dig up new likes or dislikes which we think might strike the publics fancy, and sell them to the public. We have dealt with diet, weight, coughs, mildness, quality of tobacco, nerves, toasting tobacco, youthful inspirations and a host of other subjects. The public must be given ideas as to what it should like, and it is quite surprising sometimes how the public is sold on what might look, in sales conference, like the brainchild of a demented person.

Men like George Washington Hill, who claimed that only three people in the world possessed the formula for Lucky Strike the assumption being that he was one of them but refused to name the other two, understood to perfection the ad mans old creed: you dont sell the steak, you sell the sizzle.

Robert Sobel, They Satisfy , New York, 1978
Peter B. B. Andrews, The Cigarette Market, Past and Future, Advertising and Selling ,
January 1936, cited by Brandt, Smoke: A Global History of Smoking , London, 2004