A long-running study conducted by the University of Michigan found that 19% of high school seniors used cigarettes daily in 1993. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 3.1 million adolescents currently smoke, according to the U.S. “Our biggest failure is our inability to convince our adolescents against the lures of the industry.” “The biggest success story of the public health movement is the convincing of adults not to be enticed to start smoking,” said John Pierce, a UC San Diego epidemiologist who studies the link between advertising and tobacco use.
This is because teen-agers are stepping in to fill the gap. But overall, the smoking population has remained the same. Underlying this pitched debate is a public health paradox: In the past three decades, as more and more evidence has accumulated linking smoking to disease, the number of adult Americans who smoke has steadily declined. Joe has been scrutinized up one side and down the other by the U.S. Reynolds spokeswoman: “There is nothing nefarious behind Joe Camel.
#Camel subliminal advertising professional
to tell you that cartoon characters on skateboards are not targeting 35-year-old professional women.”Ĭountered Maura Ellis, an R.J. “What is notable about Joe Camel is that it is incredibly obvious that they are targeting children,” said Mark Pertschuk, spokesman for Americans for Nonsmokers Rights, a Berkeley-based anti-tobacco group. Five years later, the percentage of adult smokers favoring Camels remained the same, but among smokers ages 12 to 18, Camel’s market share had more than tripled to 13%, prompting outrage among public health professionals and tobacco critics who say Joe Camel is proof that the industry targets young people with its ads. That has changed in the years since Joe worked his way into America’s cultural landscape, becoming a ubiquitous presence in magazines and on billboards-as well as on T-shirts, ball caps and other products that can be acquired with phony money, known as “Camel cash,” that bears the likeness of Joe dolled up, Ray-Bans and all, in a powdered George Washington wig.īefore the birth of Joe Camel in 1988, the federal government reports, an estimated 3% of teen-age smokers and 4% of adult smokers picked Camel cigarettes as their brand of choice. The marketing campaign helped reverse the declining fortunes of an 82-year-old brand that the Tobacco Reporter once bluntly described as decrepit. Reynolds Tobacco Co., the maker of Camel cigarettes, Joe Camel has been a bonanza. (Make that scape-camel.) Whatever Joe is, one thing is certain: He’s good at selling cigarettes.įor the R.J. His maker says he’s misunderstood, a scapegoat. His foes think he’s sinister-an exercise in subliminal seduction, they allege, his face fashioned after a set of male genitals.
Perhaps the biggest symbol in this controversy is smokin’ Joe, a party-hardy dromedary with an oversized schnoz, an ever-present smirk and a cigarette that is always lighted but never seems to burn. The tobacco industry is waging war on the plan, which includes a ban on billboard advertising within 1,000 feet of schools and would reduce tobacco ads to black-and-white text in magazines that have a youth readership of 15% or more. And recently, Joe Camel-along with the Marlboro man, the Virginia Slims gals and others-helped provide the impetus for President Clinton’s controversial move to sharply limit cigarette advertising in an effort to curb teen-age smoking.
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