The historic tobacco truce is one story destined for the marketing textbooks, right next to New Coke, and the smaller, but damaging case history of McDonald's Arch de Luxe. But what brought the tobacco industry to its knees?

This article was published in October 1997

What other industry would market a product that kills off its customers? Imagine for a moment a brand of ice cream that contained a carcinogen which systematically wiped out about half a million of your customer base. Let's say the health authorities are aware of the deadly substance, but cannot link it with the deaths. What if one day you were told that the company had once conducted some research, but that the detrimental evidence had been destroyed. Would you be enraged? Now let's replace ice cream with cigarettes. Oh well, that feels so much better, doesn't it? Comparing cigarettes to frozen milk is a bit like comparing apples to oranges, right? Or so the tobacco industry would like you to believe, arguing that its products were strictly legal, aimed at adults, and had no proven link to lung cancer and heart disease. They may have been absolutely right on the first count, but as powerful as Big Tobacco was, there was plenty of sniper fire to fell them down on the other two. And you can't argue with former 'Marlboro Man', David McLean who, like one in four tobacco users in the U.S. happen to be very, very dead.

While there are scores of tobacco companies to be found, ask anybody and they'll probably name the two mega brands Marlboro and Camel. This degree of top-of-mind awareness, something that gets brand managers promoted, is a product of two of the most successful advertising tactics : Consistency and repetition. Too successful, perhaps, considering the kind of attention they attracted from the anti-smoking lobby. But who cared about these noisy chaps, anyway? With their powerful allies on Madison Avenue, Wall Street, and Pennsylvania Avenue, they were like mosquitoes that had to be ignored or swatted. Their irritating buzz was often drowned by single-minded, ubiquitous, advertising. To this day, Marlboro advertising is enshrined in the marketing textbooks as evidence of repositioning and brand image : How a cowboy and a horse rescued a failed women's cigarette. They not only became the de-facto Marlboro logo, but icons of cigarette advertising itself.

Cigarette advertising once gave the tobacco a certain sense of respectability. Suddenly it made it a sitting target. Show me a cool camel, and I'll show you a killer concept.

As if to emphasize the clout that advertising carries, in a much shorter space of time, Joe Camel (the British cartoon dromedary, popularized in the U.S. in 1988, by ad agency McCann Erickson), also became an icon of Americana, alongside the likes of hundred year-old brands like Coca-Cola, Kodak, and Levi's. The ads soon attracted the kind of attention it could have done without. The anti-smoking advocates were convinced that the cool camel was a deliberate attempt to recruit children. When two of the original Marlboro cowboys died in close succession, the irony didn't go unnoticed.