I worked at a youth media company for some time. Owing to their limitless avarice, they would do brand partnerships and advertising work for all sorts of clients. One of those clients was Marlboro.
I’d hear war stories from my friends who worked at Philip Morris International, Malboro’s parent company. I heard talk of ‘dark markets’, and trips to their Bond villain lair in Lausanne, known as ‘The Cube’. Any sane person would have been revolted by this, but I found something strangely alluring about it. Tobacco seemed to me a captivating heart of darkness, a strange and antiquated world of clandestine dealings. I wanted in, but I wasn’t sure how.
In 2019 I found myself unemployed. I had left a media company a couple of years before, and then I discovered that an old colleague was working at a website funded by Philip Morris International – a purpose-led greenwashing operation that aimed to expose the corporate ills of the world while also combating the problem of smoking. Why would a tobacco company want to combat smoking, you may ask yourself? It’s a good question.
Tobacco companies, like all multinationals, operate with various messaging codes, internal languages, territorial legal issues and internal divisions. Staff come from around the globe, with teams made up of people from South Africa, Italy, Pakistan, Hungary and the USA, with English as their lingua franca.
Without fail, they all used tobacco products on Zoom calls – and sometimes even in person. Heated tobacco, which for the uninitiated is effectively a cigarette that gets placed into an electronic crucible, was ‘in’ when I started. It comes under the umbrella of ‘tobacco harm reduction,’ or THR. At a certain point in tobacco’s long history, railing against the ‘unfairness’ of various governments’ punitive legislation stopped being the de facto way of dealing with dwindling cigarette sales. A pivot was in order, and much of the research and development now goes on making these new products: heated tobacco, vapes, pouches, all with the same commodity at their heart – nicotine.
As the cigarette reaches its natural dénouement after decades of public degradation, the focus has been wrested back to nicotine in its new mutated forms. As ever with tobacco, subterfuge is the order of the day.
A typical campaign for Marlboro could look something like the following: Marlboro will approach a media company, in this case a large youth media company known for slightly unscrupulous practices. That media company would then set up a website about, let’s say, contemporary music and culture. They would interview DJs and musicians and artists and designers. Then that website, using its new cultural capital, would host a stage at a festival in Europe, often in a country where tobacco laws are a little less draconian than others. At that stage there would be representatives from Marlboro giving out free samples to impressionable festival goers, thus cementing the association of ‘cool’ with smoking for evermore. Did it work? Probably not. But these things rarely do.
A few years ago, British American Tobacco was pulled up by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) for using surreptitious means to advertise glo, its heated tobacco product, whereby glo would be placed strategically in the background of social media posts in an aim to get the kiddies interested.
