A vintage Benson & Hedge's ad evokes a cheekier (but no less deadly) era of cigarette marketing

Sometimes an ad gets just a little too truthful for its own good.  By the time this 1972 full-pager for Benson & Hedges 100’s ran in Life magazine, smoking was widely understood to be associated with a range of serious diseases. So, sure, let’s equate using our product to jumping out of a plane.  Bought by Philip Morris in 1958, Benson & Hedges is a British brand and still a subsidiary of the American conglomerate Philip Morris International. This ad was part of a larger “favorite cigarette break” campaign that leaned into the fact that Benson & Hedges offered longer cigarettes at the same price point, so people kept accidentally snapping the suckers in two. “Nobody had ever mutilated a cigarette before in American advertising—cigarettes, like automobiles, had always been treated with reverent respect by their manufacturers,” Mad Woman Mary Wells Lawrence wrote in her 2002 memoir “A Big Life (In Advertising).”  “Anything anti-establishment seemed smart in the mid-’60s, so our advertising made Benson & Hedges wildly hip and cool and the cigarette to be seen with.” (Lawrence, the first female CEO listed on the New York Stock Exchange, is still alive at 91. Must not have been a smoker.) But the times? They are a-changin’. Benson & Hedges parent PMI was in the news last week as merger talks between it and Altria Group, another American purveyor of cancer, broke down. Altria itself holds a minority stake in Juul Labs, the embattled e-cigarette maker... Continue reading at 'Advertising Age'

[ Advertising Age | 2019-09-30 09:00:00 UTC ]
News tagged with: #merger talks #minority stake #recent months #memoir

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Supermarkets sweep up market share

Written By: Philip Stone and Lisa Campbell Publication Date: Mon, 07/02/2011 - 09:24 The supermarket sector was the only winner in the 2010 retail trade, with sales jumping 7% year-on-year. Estimates based on data from Nielsen BookScan show that book sales in the UK were down by 4% in 2010 in... Continue reading at The Bookseller

[ The Bookseller | 2011-02-07 00:00:00 UTC ]
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New Android market shows the future is in device-agnostic app stores

By Tim Conneally, Betanews Google on Thursday finally launched a renewed web-based Android Market that integrates with a user's Google account and lets him shop for applications and send them to the various Android-powered devices linked to the account. This new shop marks the industry-wide... Continue reading at Betanews

[ Betanews | 2011-02-05 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Media Dealmakers Summit: "The Web Is Dead"

New York--There was a question during the morning session today at the Media Dealmakers Summit that crystallized what a lot of people are thinking about the future. "Are tablets and e-readers the future of media?" For George F. Colony, CEO of Forrester Research, the answer was simple: "Yes.... Continue reading at Folio Magazine

[ Folio Magazine | 2011-02-04 00:00:00 UTC ]
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ASA drops W H Smith R&J book club ad complaint

Written By: Lisa Campbell A complaint against a W H Smith advert for the Richard and Judy Book Club has not been upheld by the Advertising Standards Authority. The television broadcast, promoting the husband-and wife team’s exclusive deal with W H Smith to run Richard and Judy’s Book Club,... Continue reading at The Bookseller

[ The Bookseller | 2011-02-02 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Quercus increases market share by more than 100%

Written By: Lisa Campbell Quercus has announced that its market share has increased by 103% in a year. The publishing group responsible for Stieg Larsson's best-selling Millennium Trilogy, revealed the group dominated 1.37%, up from 0.66% in 2009 in a market that declined by 1.7%. Quercus chief... Continue reading at The Bookseller

[ The Bookseller | 2011-02-02 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Now Public, Demand Media Has Bigger Market Cap Than NYT

Demand Media started trading on the New York Stock Exchange this week, making it one of the first IPOs of 2011 and certainly one of the largest media IPOs that will be seen all year. Continue reading at Folio Magazine

[ Folio Magazine | 2011-01-27 00:00:00 UTC ]
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High Impact Ads on the Rise for MPA Members

While it may not apply to overall advertising budgets, "big" was in for individual ad pages that ran in MPA member magazines in 2010. According to data collected by MagazineRadar, high-impact ads that ran on heavy stock were up 19 percent in 2010 and the actual ad size increased as well: the... Continue reading at Folio Magazine

[ Folio Magazine | 2011-01-27 00:00:00 UTC ]
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No Dead Ends: Creating the Modern Web Site

While magazine Web sites are starting to take a back seat to other channels that reach readers on a daily basis (such as Facebook and Twitter) they remain the centerpiece for many publishers' digital strategies. Continue reading at Folio Magazine

[ Folio Magazine | 2011-01-27 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Pearson performing well across "anaemic" market

Pearson, the publisher of the Financial Times, said it expects its headline company operating profits to balloon by around 20% in 2010, helped by the performance of its flagship business newspaper. Continue reading at Media Week

[ Media Week | 2011-01-19 00:00:00 UTC ]
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