The interesting thing to me is the argument that the ad was confronting. That is that cigarettes are harmful one way or the other - which despite there being at the time almost zero evidence for apparently enough people thought that there was a need to cloak a particular brand with the association to doctors (who would presumably be smoking the "healthiest" cigarette).
More generally I'm all for evidence showing what's healthy - eat some fruit and vegetables occasionally, get some exercise, don't smoke, don't drink - but I don't think any of these things are mysterious. Generally people have a good handle on what's good and what's bad for them. Now, they don't always do it but that's less to do with evidence then people seem to commonly suppose.
> despite there being at the time almost zero evidence for
This isn't true—people had been connecting the dots for a few decades by the time these ads were running [0], and right around the start of the run (1940) was when strong evidence was starting to get published:
> Scholars started noting the parallel rise in cigarette consumption and lung cancer, and by the 1930s had begun to investigate this relationship using the methods of case-control epidemiology. Franz Hermann Müller at Cologne Hospital in 1939 published the first such study, comparing 86 lung cancer ‘cases’ and a similar number of cancer-free controls. Müller was able to show that people with lung cancer were far more likely than non-cancer controls to have smoked, a fact confirmed by Eberhard Schairer and Eric Schöniger at the University of Jena in an even more ambitious study from 1943. These German results were subsequently verified and amplified by UK and American scholars: in 1950 alone, five separate epidemiological studies were published, including papers by Ernst Wynder and Evarts Graham in the USA and Richard Doll and A Bradford Hill in England. All confirmed this growing suspicion, that smokers of cigarettes were far more likely to contract lung cancer than non-smokers.
So it's less a case of people intuiting what was bad for them and more a case of the industry trying (and for a few decades succeeding) to get ahead of a growing scientific consensus by advertising it into irrelevance.
> Generally people have a good handle on what's good and what's bad for them
Hard disagree, the cultural norms play a huge role and the changes are slow. I'm like 95% sure the unabated addiction to social media so prevalent nowadays will be regarded similarly to how smoking and drinking is seen now.
We should be really extrapolating what we know about tobacco now and the things they claimed in the past towards currently relevant issues e.g. "Facebook papers"-type materials.
I never noticed this until scrolling through this image gallery, but the design of these ads consistently and prominently highlights the first letters of "More Doctors," which was almost certainly intended to visually reinforce the M.D. association.
It is interesting that these ads are particularly targeted at women - maybe I am looking too much in to it, but I would guess there was (is) a big gender disparity with tobacco health concerns. These ads are quite different from the Marlboro Man - "tough cigarettes for tough men."
One potential reason might be because these ads were in women’s magazines? I’m sure they advertised in men’s magazines as well. It would be interesting to compare.
My understanding of this Stanford research group collection is that it is all the ads (or all they are able to find) - I don't think they were only collecting ads from women's magazines.
If this ad campaign was mostly run in women's magazines, that supports the same hypothesis - presumably camel was running a different message to advertise toward men.
But I'm not actually able to tell from the pictures which magazine the ad ran in - am I missing that somewhere?
The only reason you don't see "Torches of Freedom" now is because PR has become infinitely more sophisticated. To the extent that you create your own Torches of Freedom by your own volition.
An excerpt from _How to Lie with Statistics_ by Darrell Huff (1954):
> Take this one: "27 percent of a large sample of eminent physicians smoke Throaties--more than any other brand." The figure itself may be phony, of course, in any of several ways, but that really doesn't make any difference. The only answer to a figure so irrelevant is "So what?" With all proper respect toward the medical profession, do doctors know any more about tobacco brands than you do? Do they have any inside information that permits them to choose the least harmful among cigarettes? Of course they don't, and your doctor would be the first to say so. Yet that "27 percent" somehow manages to sound as if it meant something.
That book specifies many other examples (from this time period in America) of misleading claims that sound statistically significant upon an uncritical, cursory reading.
Ironically, Huff was then hired by the tobacco industry to write a book undermining the evidence that smoking causes cancer. It was to be called How to Lie with Smoking Statistics, but never got published: https://www.refsmmat.com/files/papers/huff.pdf
I think you don't mean "statistically significant" here, but something like "relevant" instead. Something can be statistically significant and entirely irrelevant if the effect size is too small.
I was recently listening to old Abbott & Costello radio shows from 1946 and they were also heavily sponsored by Camel and frequently played an audio ad of "more doctors smoke camels." I got quite a kick out of it! They really ran hard with that message.
> In an attempt to substantiate the “More Doctors” claim, R.J. Reynolds paid for surveys to be conducted during medical conventions using two survey methods: Doctors were gifted free packs of Camel cigarettes at tobacco company booths and them upon exiting the exhibit hall, were then immediately asked to indicate their favorite brand or were asked which cigarette they carried in their pocket.
It was a different time and people genuinely did not know the harms of smoking like we do now, but this would be wrong to a caveman from 10000 BC
I remember, in the 1980s, the American Heart Association never listed tobacco as a contributor to heart disease. I'm pretty sure that the tobacco industry figured highly, in their funding sources.
These days, they are very adamant that tobacco is a big factor.
Also, I believe that a lot of stress research (the one that created the "Type A personality") was funded by the tobacco industry.
I can't get to worked up about the way the surveys were conducted since this was advertising. If R.J. Reynolds were trying to publish peer reviewed papers based on there survey results and excluded the fact that the doctors were given free cigarettes that would be more of an issue. I'm sure much worse stuff was done in an effort to hide the health effects of smoking but it's not something I have familiarity with.
The "Costlier Tobaccos" tag line looks strange now. Products which want to show sophistication no longer promote the fact that they are more expensive.
Ads back then had so much copy. What’s with that? Was it easy to command attention for that long because there wasn’t much else to do? No smart phone in the waiting room to compete with?
I see magazines with multi-page ads which read exactly like articles but have additional labeling that they're explicitly ads written by the company instead of ads written by the writers of the magazine. Often with slightly different styling.
This example magazine has a number of single page ads with a good bit of copy in them. I'm trying to find an example magazine with those multi-page ads at the moment though.
The people who are actually interested in your product will generally want lots of information. Prior to the internet, how did they actually get that information? Overwhelmingly, through print advertising. If people who have no interest in your product see the headline and turn the page before getting to the body copy, that's no real loss; if people who are interested in your product have questions that aren't answered by the copy, that is potentially a very real loss.
There would have been a stack of these magazines in every home and each page would have been picked over several times.
When I was a child magazines were still very popular and I would not rest until every last millimeter of each one was examined in detail multiple times.
I suspect that there was little data to analyze how much attention the ads were commanding back then.
I often think about how so many things now have been optimized (mostly for profit) to the extreme by data-driven processes, with big corporate marketing certainly being one of them.
Up until two or three decades ago, I suspect that it was all based on tradition and the "gut feel" of out-of-touch and arrogant executives talking to each other over drinks (thinking of scenes from Mad Men here).
I took my marketing classes for my business degree in the early 2000s. Digital marketing was not addressed. The advice at the time was to get to six "impressions," six encounters with your brand before most people would start to recognize the brand. And it was very much admitted that you don't get to measure this and you must correlate sales trends with marketing trends. Very much "gut feel" in comparison of digital tracking. I'm still not convinced the tracking makes that big of a difference but obviously the market disagrees with me.
Digital tracking can be helpful as a proxy, but what matters - and what big brands still measure - is how marketing correlates to sales. Statistics can figure out a lot of this, though the data is noisy.
> No smart phone in the waiting room to compete with?
Yes. Sometimes it was a deliberate tactic - mostly adverts would go for the 'just an evocative picture', but a few would go the 'wall of text' route. My memory pops up the name Alan Sugar for an example of those - really dense walls ...
People with self respect will find it insulting if an advertisement doesn't try to convince them with copy. In the past, advertisers wanted to be careful to not insult their prospective clients. Modern ads usually have an undertone of "we despise you" towards their prospective clients. I guess they figured out that it's better spent dollars to try to reach people without self respect.
This is a bit broad. Tobacco was very significant in Virginia and Maryland (which, along with North Carolina, did use it as money for a period—before the United States was an independent nation [0]). Its influence outside of that region was significant, but I wouldn't characterize it as foundational.
It's wild to see the ad copy promote the high cost of Camels ("costlier tobacco".) I grew up fairly poor, but my dad always had money for cigarettes and was a 2-3 pack a day smoker. Almost always Camels. Occasionally Marlboros. In any case, I don't remember them being marketed as a cigarette for people who wanted to light more money on fire than their neighbors, but perhaps I just didn't pick up on it as a kid.
During the early 90s, RJ Reynolds had a promotion called "Camel Cash", where each pack of cigarettes came with a coupon that could be redeemed for Camel merch (tshirts, beach towels, etc.) Our car was covered in cigarette ash, a vaguely sticky layer of tar, and stacks and stacks of Camel Cash. Most of the instrument cluster was obscured by Camel Cash stacked in front of it. We were Camel Cash millionaires.
If memory serves, cigarette packs were priced fairly close to each other. They were implying they did not skimp on the quality of the source product (unlike the other brands' thieving profiteers ;-)
There were definitely "expensive" cigarettes and "cheap" cigarettes. It wasn't uncommon for my parents/their friends to go back and forth between a few brands as their fortunes changed.
I worked in a small kiosk in the late 80's. Most cigarettes were the same price, but Camels were quite a bit more expensive (25% or so as I recall.)
Our target market was, how shall I put it, price sensitive. The Camels weren't terribly popular :)
Visit a psych ward on a Friday night and let me know if it hasn't hit a tipping point yet. My wife works with several people who have kids that are cutting themselves and are in and out of psych treatment and ERs.
It’s kind of a “tell”, right? On the face of things, it would make just as much sense to say “More software devs smoke Camels than any other cigarette.” You wouldn’t call out “doctors” unless everyone knew this was unhealthy.
He was pointing out the hypocrisy in "trust the science" buzzwords used during the pandemic. Science is based on skepticism, not "trust", and being a skeptic back then was somehow considered censorship-worthy.
edit: because i'm being rate-limited for some reason (thanks mods), i'm refering to stuff like this:
> And we have -- we can kind of almost see the end. We`re vaccinating so very fast, our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick, and that it`s not just in the clinical trials but it`s also in real world data.
Hey, the media, the CDC, "the science" says that if you're vaccinated, you're safe, you won't infect your immunocompromised grandma, you won't get sick, you won't spread covid. I mean... don't be a skeptic, "trust" them.
Or you can say "even if you're vaccinated, you'll still get covid and still infect grandma", and be censored from most platforms" (back then).
There seemed to be a lot of loud, bad-faith, antagonists in that era that likely ended up killing a lot of people. Things like drinking bleach, using de-wormer, don't get vaccines, masks are bad for you, etc... It was exhausting to hear because it got a whole big group of people to cosplay domain experts and the rest of us had to deal with the fallout of millions dying.
Sure, there are nutjobs everywhere, but contrary to principles of science, everyone was told to "trust the science".
Not "be skeptical, verify, repeat, etc.", but "trust".... you shouldn't have to blidndly trust science, that's reserved for nutjobs speaking to god by yelling into a hat, where there's no way to verify.
Many people also got vaccinated because the science mentioned 94% (or whatever) effciveness against covid infections, about preventing spread, and guess what, trusting that killed immunocompromised grandma too.
> trusting that killed immunocompromised grandma too.
This is the sort of stuff that I was referring to above. It sounds shocking and plausible, but at the end of the day, if you flatly ask someone "would you like a 10% chance to die from covid (being a grandma), or would you like (some lower %) chance to die to prevent it", then why not try?
What if you ask them, instead, "would you like a 1% chance of dying of covid (being a healthy male under 40) or an unknown chance at an unknown reaction that may include myocarditis from a new treatment?", then why do it?
For a while, this was what those around me were saying. It was much, much later that covid itself was associated with even more myocarditis than the vaccine.
for values of "unknown chance" well under 1 in 100,000. you sound like the same kind of American who prefers the quarter pounder to the third pounder because 4 > 3.
No, the question is, do you 'trust the science', the quote from the director of cdc:
> And we have -- we can kind of almost see the end. We`re vaccinating so very fast, our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick, and that it`s not just in the clinical trials but it`s also in real world data.
...and the visit grandma, who cannot get vaccinated (immunocompromised), because you're vaccinated, and don't carry the virus and don't get sick?
Or are you one of those 'conspiracy theorists' who say "the vaccinated are carrying the virus, even if you're vaccinated, you'll still get sick and kill grandma"?
> In the clip, Dr Fauci says “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.”
Trust us, there's no reason to be walking around with a mask.
And then a few weeks later, again "trust us, you need a mask".
To simplify for you, you can trust yor girlfriend (boyfriend, whatver), but after s/he cheats on you multiple times and changes her(his) story the same amount of times, the trust is lost.
> "The science" was literally changing every few days"
the world's sum total knowledge about the virus was changing from day to day - what did you want - stone tablets and burning bushes?
the mask message made sense: they were very clear, that in the early stages, it didn't make sense for everybody to wear them (community transmission was still low) and deprive medical personnel who needed them desperately (they were far more likely to encounter the virus for reasons I hope you are smart enough to figure out for yourself - but shout out and I'll try to explain further if it's not clear).
later on when community transmission was high and we had much larger supplies of masks, it made sense for more people to wear them, because then it would make a difference to the total transmission.
it seems that you just wanted an all knowing parental figure to tell you what to do and never change their opinion - that's not how real life works. in the adult world, when new information becomes available, or the situation changes, the rules can be changed. this isn't church.
and yes, even the chief of the cdc can be wrong, speak wrong, make mistakes, or get a message across poorly trying to produce short and snappy soundbites that the likes of you have a chance of remembering. but the underlying message wasn't wrong, it was correct based on available evidence at the time. it was a stressful situation and they probably didn't get much sleep for several months.
But for science to change, you must NOT trust existing science. The opposite of what 'the science' was telling people to do - "trust science".
The first mask message was that you don't need a mask. If you then censor and ban everyone who says "don't listen to fauci, buy a mask", and a few weeks later ban everyone who says "listen to fauci's statement two weeks ago, you don't need a mask", who's left then? If the "science changed", then the people not trusting the first "truth" were correct in not trusting it. But we censored them and called them idiots for buying and wearing masks, before the 'science changed'. They didn't trust fauci and the science, and had masks, the ones who trusted, didn't.
People literally died, that could have been saved by wearing a mask before mask mandates. Also people died because they trusted the vaccines, and killed other people, because they trusted the vaccines wold prevent spread. If you trusted the CDC director and visited grandma, you might have killed her. If you didnt trust the effectiveness of vaccines, you didn't visit her, and she could be still alive.
We had 4 types of vaccines in my country, astrazeneca, j&j, moderna and pfizer. All of them were "safe and effective". Then astrazeneca was pulled out, because of heart issues, but the other three were safe and effective. Then j&j was pulled out. Then moderna. In my country (~2mio pop), we had 5 deaths with(!) covid in the sub 35yo group (with the wonky counting of deaths), which is less than suicide deaths, overdoses, etc. Also 1 vaccine death ( https://www.gov.si/en/news/2021-11-30-expert-commission-conf... )
Look, I know what you're trying to say, scientists know what they're doing, but i'm pointing out that "trust" is not the right word to be used with science. Church? Sure, trust someone with some imaginary friend, because more than trust is impossible. But with science (as you said "total knowledge about the virus was changing from day to day"), you cannot call people to 'trust' it, because (again, as you said yourself), the science was wrong and "changed" and trust is broken.
Also "hey, we lied to you before, because we were incompetent at buying masks for medcical workers, so we instead chose to risk your life instead" is a stupid argument. This is how you lose what little is left of "trust" in those authorities.
TLDR: if you trust, you're stuck with stone tablets and burning bushes (well, leeches and smoke enemas in case of medical treatments). Only with distrust can science go forwards. If we banned all the smoke-enema skeptics back then, we'd never more onwards from there.
The emphasis on "trust the science" is the "the science", not "trust". Everyone ultimately needs to trust something, and it is better if that is a scientific consensus than if it's what the anchors on fox news are saying.
no, the skepticism is for people who understand what they are being skeptical about. if you have a degree in chemistry and you disagree with one other chemist, I'd have to listen to both of you and try to make up my own mind. if you disagree with 99% of chemists, then I'm not ingesting what you suggest nor avoiding what they recommend.
you don't get to point to Facebook posts by uncle Rob who reposts crackpot ideas 24/7 and call that "a controversy". there is such a thing as being wrong.
> Hey, the media, the CDC, "the science" says that if you're vaccinated, you're safe, you won't infect your immunocompromised grandma, you won't get sick, you won't spread covid.
to my knowledge, this is not what the science said. the science always said "if youre vaccinated, you are less likely to experience severe covid symptoms"
The actual science, sure. But "the science" in the sense of what the media, and people arguing online, were claiming the science said, absolutely went a lot further than the evidence. It was widely claimed that the vaccines gave immunity, for example.
Meanwhile, actual science, medical practitioners, have been clear for many decades that vaccines reduce infection and transmission rates, etc.
Vaccines didn't "cure Polio" in any absolute sense, but they did make it possible to suppress it until it no longer appeared "in the wild" .. until it came back again.
Free speech beats the alternative. But it's important to realise that just because the media (or anyone) confidently claims something doesn't mean it's true (not generally because they're lying, just because they're wildly overconfident), and that's still true when they tell you what they're saying is "the science".
did you set up an independent printing press and the government came to shut you down? if so, yes, your right to free speech was indeed gravely violated!
> And we have -- we can kind of almost see the end. We`re vaccinating so very fast, our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick, and that it`s not just in the clinical trials but it`s also in real world data.
This quote is literally from the director of the CDC (source in comment above). I mean.. who better to 'trust'?
We can't trust people who say "the science" is on their side. We can't trust popular science reporting. If you want to know what the science actually says, you have to dig into it yourself and e.g. read some papers (and even that might not be enough - you have to know which journals are credible and which aren't).
Which science don't you trust, the science that once said smoking is harmless or the science which currently says smoking is harmful? Or do you cover all your bases and just not trust science regardless?
"The science" never said that smoking is harmless. Concerns were being raised as early as the 1930s and epidemiological evidence had conclusively demonstrated the link between tobacco smoking, lung cancer and cardiovascular disease by the early 1950s. The tobacco industry pursued a relentless campaign to cast doubt on that science, which was so successful that even today people imagine that there was once an actual controversy.
The tobacco industry also shifted to the most deadly form, cigarettes. Casual low use cigar smokers that don't inhale ( proper way to smoke cigar ) iirc have lower lung cancer and higher life expectancy than non smokers. Pipes and cigar were generally better especially when used in moderation even against moderate cigarette smoking.
Although generally the US just has bad tobacco habits. 'European' style smoking of a cigarette with coffee a couple times a week likely will kill you slower than whatever was going to get you like cooking and eating smoky grilled meats.
Was there ever any sustained science that claimed smoking was harmless? AFAIU, smoking was considered by the general population as not good for you health since at least the early 20th century, and before then as at least a vice (as was caffeine!). By mid century there was sustained scientific output showing clear links to cancer, solidifying cigarettes as an acute hazard to your health even if the scope and magnitude of the harms were less than we know today. Tobacco companies and their defenders countered this sentiment using the same tools used today--dissembling, whataboutism, and your basic FUD techniques. You can't look at ads promoting cigarettes and assume most people accepted what they're communicating at face value.
Anyhow, almost everybody knows today that, for example, eating too much sugar is bad for you, but the majority of the population still does it. That's how humans behave. Often times people do something because it's bad, taboo, or dangerous. And not everybody centers their lifestyle around good health; some people are just trying to get through the day. Today we still have doctors who smoke, dentists who drink soda, etc, though those particular vices are less popular than they once were. And let's not forget, while cigarette smoking has been in free fall doctors have been happily handing out prescriptions to smoke marijuana, even though inhaling marijuana smoke is at least as harmful as cigarettes (most people smoke it less frequently, but that's beside the point). Just because something is accepted as normal doesn't mean the harms are being outright denied.
One who believes in that line trusts neither, one imagines. The thing that people often misunderstand about not trusting something is that it is different from believing it is guaranteed to be wrong. Not trusting something means that it doesn't provide evidence. i.e. if you don't trust some source X, and X provides some evidence X_A about some event A then not trusting them means that P(A|X_A) ~= P(A) your prior probability.
People often interpret the "I don't trust X" statement to be "belief in the opposite", i.e. P(¬A|X_A) = 1. This is obviously stupid since someone you distrust could happily manufacture evidence for ¬A and then you'd conclude P(¬¬A|X_¬A) = 1 so they could make you believe anything, which is obviously not something you want someone you distrust to do to you.
I'm not sure that's correct in practice. The people that harbor vocal distrust in agencies, professions, etc. really do seem more apt to directly believe whatever is in opposition to the "distrusted" message. While your proposal remains a logical alternative to them, adoption seems markedly low.
Nah, they "believe" in that line when the science says anything that contradicts their priors. When the science says anything that confirms them they ingest and cite it gladly.
The interesting thing to me is the argument that the ad was confronting. That is that cigarettes are harmful one way or the other - which despite there being at the time almost zero evidence for apparently enough people thought that there was a need to cloak a particular brand with the association to doctors (who would presumably be smoking the "healthiest" cigarette).
More generally I'm all for evidence showing what's healthy - eat some fruit and vegetables occasionally, get some exercise, don't smoke, don't drink - but I don't think any of these things are mysterious. Generally people have a good handle on what's good and what's bad for them. Now, they don't always do it but that's less to do with evidence then people seem to commonly suppose.
> despite there being at the time almost zero evidence for
This isn't true—people had been connecting the dots for a few decades by the time these ads were running [0], and right around the start of the run (1940) was when strong evidence was starting to get published:
> Scholars started noting the parallel rise in cigarette consumption and lung cancer, and by the 1930s had begun to investigate this relationship using the methods of case-control epidemiology. Franz Hermann Müller at Cologne Hospital in 1939 published the first such study, comparing 86 lung cancer ‘cases’ and a similar number of cancer-free controls. Müller was able to show that people with lung cancer were far more likely than non-cancer controls to have smoked, a fact confirmed by Eberhard Schairer and Eric Schöniger at the University of Jena in an even more ambitious study from 1943. These German results were subsequently verified and amplified by UK and American scholars: in 1950 alone, five separate epidemiological studies were published, including papers by Ernst Wynder and Evarts Graham in the USA and Richard Doll and A Bradford Hill in England. All confirmed this growing suspicion, that smokers of cigarettes were far more likely to contract lung cancer than non-smokers.
So it's less a case of people intuiting what was bad for them and more a case of the industry trying (and for a few decades succeeding) to get ahead of a growing scientific consensus by advertising it into irrelevance.
[0] https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/21/2/87
> Generally people have a good handle on what's good and what's bad for them
Hard disagree, the cultural norms play a huge role and the changes are slow. I'm like 95% sure the unabated addiction to social media so prevalent nowadays will be regarded similarly to how smoking and drinking is seen now.
We should be really extrapolating what we know about tobacco now and the things they claimed in the past towards currently relevant issues e.g. "Facebook papers"-type materials.
I never noticed this until scrolling through this image gallery, but the design of these ads consistently and prominently highlights the first letters of "More Doctors," which was almost certainly intended to visually reinforce the M.D. association.
It is interesting that these ads are particularly targeted at women - maybe I am looking too much in to it, but I would guess there was (is) a big gender disparity with tobacco health concerns. These ads are quite different from the Marlboro Man - "tough cigarettes for tough men."
Marlboro was originally marketed to women under the slogan "Mild as May", before being repositioned as a cigarette for men in the 1950s.
https://tobacco.stanford.edu/cigarettes/light-super-ultra-li...
One potential reason might be because these ads were in women’s magazines? I’m sure they advertised in men’s magazines as well. It would be interesting to compare.
My understanding of this Stanford research group collection is that it is all the ads (or all they are able to find) - I don't think they were only collecting ads from women's magazines.
If this ad campaign was mostly run in women's magazines, that supports the same hypothesis - presumably camel was running a different message to advertise toward men.
But I'm not actually able to tell from the pictures which magazine the ad ran in - am I missing that somewhere?
I think it's because so many men smoked that marketing to women was a growth opportunity.
You may want to search "Torches of Freedom" and go down that rabbit hole.
The only reason you don't see "Torches of Freedom" now is because PR has become infinitely more sophisticated. To the extent that you create your own Torches of Freedom by your own volition.
Great point. I had a conversation with my sister on this topic recently. Maybe women are realising.
Advertisements in general are usually targeted to women, still today. They spend more and make the spending decisions if they have a husband.
An excerpt from _How to Lie with Statistics_ by Darrell Huff (1954):
> Take this one: "27 percent of a large sample of eminent physicians smoke Throaties--more than any other brand." The figure itself may be phony, of course, in any of several ways, but that really doesn't make any difference. The only answer to a figure so irrelevant is "So what?" With all proper respect toward the medical profession, do doctors know any more about tobacco brands than you do? Do they have any inside information that permits them to choose the least harmful among cigarettes? Of course they don't, and your doctor would be the first to say so. Yet that "27 percent" somehow manages to sound as if it meant something.
That book specifies many other examples (from this time period in America) of misleading claims that sound statistically significant upon an uncritical, cursory reading.
Ironically, Huff was then hired by the tobacco industry to write a book undermining the evidence that smoking causes cancer. It was to be called How to Lie with Smoking Statistics, but never got published: https://www.refsmmat.com/files/papers/huff.pdf
I think you don't mean "statistically significant" here, but something like "relevant" instead. Something can be statistically significant and entirely irrelevant if the effect size is too small.
I was recently listening to old Abbott & Costello radio shows from 1946 and they were also heavily sponsored by Camel and frequently played an audio ad of "more doctors smoke camels." I got quite a kick out of it! They really ran hard with that message.
We used to get Abbott & Costello tapes out from the library for long road trips in the 80s. To this day I still remember those Camel ads.
> In an attempt to substantiate the “More Doctors” claim, R.J. Reynolds paid for surveys to be conducted during medical conventions using two survey methods: Doctors were gifted free packs of Camel cigarettes at tobacco company booths and them upon exiting the exhibit hall, were then immediately asked to indicate their favorite brand or were asked which cigarette they carried in their pocket.
It was a different time and people genuinely did not know the harms of smoking like we do now, but this would be wrong to a caveman from 10000 BC
The ethical standards of advertising are obviously very, very low.
Much better now, to make you feel helpless, depressed, lacking just to keep you consuming anything
Ethical standards are exactly the same, it’s regulation that is very different, let’s not give credit to corporations that they absolutely not deserve
I remember, in the 1980s, the American Heart Association never listed tobacco as a contributor to heart disease. I'm pretty sure that the tobacco industry figured highly, in their funding sources.
These days, they are very adamant that tobacco is a big factor.
Also, I believe that a lot of stress research (the one that created the "Type A personality") was funded by the tobacco industry.
> It was a different time and people genuinely did not know the harms of smoking like we do now
My grandmother (born in 1928, started smoking at 13) said that, growing up, people casually referred to cigarettes as "cancer sticks".
> It was a different time
Not that different.
> and people genuinely did not know the harms of smoking like we do now
The tobacco companies knew very well. IIRC, the medical community kinda-sorta knew and kinda-sorta suppressed the knowledge.
I can't get to worked up about the way the surveys were conducted since this was advertising. If R.J. Reynolds were trying to publish peer reviewed papers based on there survey results and excluded the fact that the doctors were given free cigarettes that would be more of an issue. I'm sure much worse stuff was done in an effort to hide the health effects of smoking but it's not something I have familiarity with.
The "Costlier Tobaccos" tag line looks strange now. Products which want to show sophistication no longer promote the fact that they are more expensive.
I think they are saying that they are paying more to the tobacco suppliers than their competitors - kind of like saying "we use quality ingredients".
There was another ad where they put quotes from tobacco farmers that said "nobody pays more for my tobacco than..."
I think modern term is "Premium". Which is more expensive than standard. Maybe it is more indirect, but it is very often there.
Ads back then had so much copy. What’s with that? Was it easy to command attention for that long because there wasn’t much else to do? No smart phone in the waiting room to compete with?
I see magazines with multi-page ads which read exactly like articles but have additional labeling that they're explicitly ads written by the company instead of ads written by the writers of the magazine. Often with slightly different styling.
This example magazine has a number of single page ads with a good bit of copy in them. I'm trying to find an example magazine with those multi-page ads at the moment though.
https://flickread.com/edition/html/676148065c1ba#1
I think those style of ads are called advertorials, so that might help you find them. Internet Archive has lots of magazine scans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertorial
The people who are actually interested in your product will generally want lots of information. Prior to the internet, how did they actually get that information? Overwhelmingly, through print advertising. If people who have no interest in your product see the headline and turn the page before getting to the body copy, that's no real loss; if people who are interested in your product have questions that aren't answered by the copy, that is potentially a very real loss.
Usually the copy is entirely devoid of "information" per se. It's a series of nice sounding but totally vacuous statements.
There would have been a stack of these magazines in every home and each page would have been picked over several times.
When I was a child magazines were still very popular and I would not rest until every last millimeter of each one was examined in detail multiple times.
I suspect that there was little data to analyze how much attention the ads were commanding back then.
I often think about how so many things now have been optimized (mostly for profit) to the extreme by data-driven processes, with big corporate marketing certainly being one of them.
Up until two or three decades ago, I suspect that it was all based on tradition and the "gut feel" of out-of-touch and arrogant executives talking to each other over drinks (thinking of scenes from Mad Men here).
I took my marketing classes for my business degree in the early 2000s. Digital marketing was not addressed. The advice at the time was to get to six "impressions," six encounters with your brand before most people would start to recognize the brand. And it was very much admitted that you don't get to measure this and you must correlate sales trends with marketing trends. Very much "gut feel" in comparison of digital tracking. I'm still not convinced the tracking makes that big of a difference but obviously the market disagrees with me.
Digital tracking can be helpful as a proxy, but what matters - and what big brands still measure - is how marketing correlates to sales. Statistics can figure out a lot of this, though the data is noisy.
No website to check the details of a product either
> No smart phone in the waiting room to compete with?
Yes. Sometimes it was a deliberate tactic - mostly adverts would go for the 'just an evocative picture', but a few would go the 'wall of text' route. My memory pops up the name Alan Sugar for an example of those - really dense walls ...
People with self respect will find it insulting if an advertisement doesn't try to convince them with copy. In the past, advertisers wanted to be careful to not insult their prospective clients. Modern ads usually have an undertone of "we despise you" towards their prospective clients. I guess they figured out that it's better spent dollars to try to reach people without self respect.
The country was founded on tobacco. It was used as currency for the first 150 years.
This is a bit broad. Tobacco was very significant in Virginia and Maryland (which, along with North Carolina, did use it as money for a period—before the United States was an independent nation [0]). Its influence outside of that region was significant, but I wouldn't characterize it as foundational.
[0] https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/dictionaries-thesauruse...
If there’s any truth to the pop culture trope of trading cigarette cartons in prisons, it possibly never stopped being used as currency.
Cigarettes have been replaced with sealed packets of fish.
It would be black market currency now. Most US jails and prisons ban cigarettes.
It's wild to see the ad copy promote the high cost of Camels ("costlier tobacco".) I grew up fairly poor, but my dad always had money for cigarettes and was a 2-3 pack a day smoker. Almost always Camels. Occasionally Marlboros. In any case, I don't remember them being marketed as a cigarette for people who wanted to light more money on fire than their neighbors, but perhaps I just didn't pick up on it as a kid.
During the early 90s, RJ Reynolds had a promotion called "Camel Cash", where each pack of cigarettes came with a coupon that could be redeemed for Camel merch (tshirts, beach towels, etc.) Our car was covered in cigarette ash, a vaguely sticky layer of tar, and stacks and stacks of Camel Cash. Most of the instrument cluster was obscured by Camel Cash stacked in front of it. We were Camel Cash millionaires.
> high cost of Camels ("costlier tobacco".)
If memory serves, cigarette packs were priced fairly close to each other. They were implying they did not skimp on the quality of the source product (unlike the other brands' thieving profiteers ;-)
There were definitely "expensive" cigarettes and "cheap" cigarettes. It wasn't uncommon for my parents/their friends to go back and forth between a few brands as their fortunes changed.
I worked in a small kiosk in the late 80's. Most cigarettes were the same price, but Camels were quite a bit more expensive (25% or so as I recall.) Our target market was, how shall I put it, price sensitive. The Camels weren't terribly popular :)
I remember Pall Mall and L&M as the cheaper brands. Maybe they weren’t in your area?
They were also very strong and flavorful. Not something that a lot of people could handle.
What is the cigarettes of today that we later learn it's not good for us or it does nothing ... recycling or drinking water from plastic bottles?
Social media. I think many people already realize this, but it hasn’t yet hit a tipping point.
As an ex pack a day smoker, realizing it doesn't really matter.
I knew the first cigarette I smoked was a cancer causing terrible idea.
The reason I did was because I was young and most other people I knew were doing the same thing. Same with social media.
Visit a psych ward on a Friday night and let me know if it hasn't hit a tipping point yet. My wife works with several people who have kids that are cutting themselves and are in and out of psych treatment and ERs.
And AI but it's too new but maybe it will kill the Internet (social media with it) as nothing you see starts to be truly believable.
In terms of things that we allow to be advertised but probably shouldn't: sodas, medical products, politicians.
Covid vaccines, sugar, plant meat...
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And people wonder why others don't "trust the science".
You are confusing science with ad copy.
No, but the post implies a belief that many people will confuse the two. And it might be right.
There was a lot of science paid by big tobacco (and big sugar and many others like hydrogenated fats), that then turned into ads.
It’s kind of a “tell”, right? On the face of things, it would make just as much sense to say “More software devs smoke Camels than any other cigarette.” You wouldn’t call out “doctors” unless everyone knew this was unhealthy.
Assertion: a tobacco company used misleading marketing practices.
Conclusion: science is a lie.
Conclusion: People dying.
Do you know why I only drink grain alcohol, Mandrake?
the antidote to bad science has always been more science by independent experts.
what else would you suggest?
He was pointing out the hypocrisy in "trust the science" buzzwords used during the pandemic. Science is based on skepticism, not "trust", and being a skeptic back then was somehow considered censorship-worthy.
edit: because i'm being rate-limited for some reason (thanks mods), i'm refering to stuff like this:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210402002315/https://www.msnbc...
> And we have -- we can kind of almost see the end. We`re vaccinating so very fast, our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick, and that it`s not just in the clinical trials but it`s also in real world data.
Hey, the media, the CDC, "the science" says that if you're vaccinated, you're safe, you won't infect your immunocompromised grandma, you won't get sick, you won't spread covid. I mean... don't be a skeptic, "trust" them.
Or you can say "even if you're vaccinated, you'll still get covid and still infect grandma", and be censored from most platforms" (back then).
There seemed to be a lot of loud, bad-faith, antagonists in that era that likely ended up killing a lot of people. Things like drinking bleach, using de-wormer, don't get vaccines, masks are bad for you, etc... It was exhausting to hear because it got a whole big group of people to cosplay domain experts and the rest of us had to deal with the fallout of millions dying.
Sure, there are nutjobs everywhere, but contrary to principles of science, everyone was told to "trust the science".
Not "be skeptical, verify, repeat, etc.", but "trust".... you shouldn't have to blidndly trust science, that's reserved for nutjobs speaking to god by yelling into a hat, where there's no way to verify.
Many people also got vaccinated because the science mentioned 94% (or whatever) effciveness against covid infections, about preventing spread, and guess what, trusting that killed immunocompromised grandma too.
> trusting that killed immunocompromised grandma too.
This is the sort of stuff that I was referring to above. It sounds shocking and plausible, but at the end of the day, if you flatly ask someone "would you like a 10% chance to die from covid (being a grandma), or would you like (some lower %) chance to die to prevent it", then why not try?
What if you ask them, instead, "would you like a 1% chance of dying of covid (being a healthy male under 40) or an unknown chance at an unknown reaction that may include myocarditis from a new treatment?", then why do it?
For a while, this was what those around me were saying. It was much, much later that covid itself was associated with even more myocarditis than the vaccine.
> unknown chance
for values of "unknown chance" well under 1 in 100,000. you sound like the same kind of American who prefers the quarter pounder to the third pounder because 4 > 3.
No, the question is, do you 'trust the science', the quote from the director of cdc:
> And we have -- we can kind of almost see the end. We`re vaccinating so very fast, our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick, and that it`s not just in the clinical trials but it`s also in real world data.
...and the visit grandma, who cannot get vaccinated (immunocompromised), because you're vaccinated, and don't carry the virus and don't get sick?
Or are you one of those 'conspiracy theorists' who say "the vaccinated are carrying the virus, even if you're vaccinated, you'll still get sick and kill grandma"?
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> Not "be skeptical, verify, repeat, etc.", but "trust"...
that's because you don't have the skills for it. you can't even deal with poor reporting, but you want to verify/repeat?
did you also let your kids operate the oven before they could walk?
So a direct quote by the director of the cdc is poor reporting?
And what skills do I need? "The science" was literally changing every few days.
Trust us, vaccinated pople don't carry the virus.
And then a few months later "whoops".
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/fact-checkoutdated-vid...
> In the clip, Dr Fauci says “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.”
Trust us, there's no reason to be walking around with a mask.
And then a few weeks later, again "trust us, you need a mask".
To simplify for you, you can trust yor girlfriend (boyfriend, whatver), but after s/he cheats on you multiple times and changes her(his) story the same amount of times, the trust is lost.
> "The science" was literally changing every few days"
the world's sum total knowledge about the virus was changing from day to day - what did you want - stone tablets and burning bushes?
the mask message made sense: they were very clear, that in the early stages, it didn't make sense for everybody to wear them (community transmission was still low) and deprive medical personnel who needed them desperately (they were far more likely to encounter the virus for reasons I hope you are smart enough to figure out for yourself - but shout out and I'll try to explain further if it's not clear).
later on when community transmission was high and we had much larger supplies of masks, it made sense for more people to wear them, because then it would make a difference to the total transmission.
it seems that you just wanted an all knowing parental figure to tell you what to do and never change their opinion - that's not how real life works. in the adult world, when new information becomes available, or the situation changes, the rules can be changed. this isn't church.
and yes, even the chief of the cdc can be wrong, speak wrong, make mistakes, or get a message across poorly trying to produce short and snappy soundbites that the likes of you have a chance of remembering. but the underlying message wasn't wrong, it was correct based on available evidence at the time. it was a stressful situation and they probably didn't get much sleep for several months.
But for science to change, you must NOT trust existing science. The opposite of what 'the science' was telling people to do - "trust science".
The first mask message was that you don't need a mask. If you then censor and ban everyone who says "don't listen to fauci, buy a mask", and a few weeks later ban everyone who says "listen to fauci's statement two weeks ago, you don't need a mask", who's left then? If the "science changed", then the people not trusting the first "truth" were correct in not trusting it. But we censored them and called them idiots for buying and wearing masks, before the 'science changed'. They didn't trust fauci and the science, and had masks, the ones who trusted, didn't.
People literally died, that could have been saved by wearing a mask before mask mandates. Also people died because they trusted the vaccines, and killed other people, because they trusted the vaccines wold prevent spread. If you trusted the CDC director and visited grandma, you might have killed her. If you didnt trust the effectiveness of vaccines, you didn't visit her, and she could be still alive.
We had 4 types of vaccines in my country, astrazeneca, j&j, moderna and pfizer. All of them were "safe and effective". Then astrazeneca was pulled out, because of heart issues, but the other three were safe and effective. Then j&j was pulled out. Then moderna. In my country (~2mio pop), we had 5 deaths with(!) covid in the sub 35yo group (with the wonky counting of deaths), which is less than suicide deaths, overdoses, etc. Also 1 vaccine death ( https://www.gov.si/en/news/2021-11-30-expert-commission-conf... )
Look, I know what you're trying to say, scientists know what they're doing, but i'm pointing out that "trust" is not the right word to be used with science. Church? Sure, trust someone with some imaginary friend, because more than trust is impossible. But with science (as you said "total knowledge about the virus was changing from day to day"), you cannot call people to 'trust' it, because (again, as you said yourself), the science was wrong and "changed" and trust is broken.
Also "hey, we lied to you before, because we were incompetent at buying masks for medcical workers, so we instead chose to risk your life instead" is a stupid argument. This is how you lose what little is left of "trust" in those authorities.
TLDR: if you trust, you're stuck with stone tablets and burning bushes (well, leeches and smoke enemas in case of medical treatments). Only with distrust can science go forwards. If we banned all the smoke-enema skeptics back then, we'd never more onwards from there.
The emphasis on "trust the science" is the "the science", not "trust". Everyone ultimately needs to trust something, and it is better if that is a scientific consensus than if it's what the anchors on fox news are saying.
no, the skepticism is for people who understand what they are being skeptical about. if you have a degree in chemistry and you disagree with one other chemist, I'd have to listen to both of you and try to make up my own mind. if you disagree with 99% of chemists, then I'm not ingesting what you suggest nor avoiding what they recommend.
you don't get to point to Facebook posts by uncle Rob who reposts crackpot ideas 24/7 and call that "a controversy". there is such a thing as being wrong.
> Hey, the media, the CDC, "the science" says that if you're vaccinated, you're safe, you won't infect your immunocompromised grandma, you won't get sick, you won't spread covid.
to my knowledge, this is not what the science said. the science always said "if youre vaccinated, you are less likely to experience severe covid symptoms"
The quote above is literally from the director of the CDC
The actual science, sure. But "the science" in the sense of what the media, and people arguing online, were claiming the science said, absolutely went a lot further than the evidence. It was widely claimed that the vaccines gave immunity, for example.
That's free speech in the US for you.
Meanwhile, actual science, medical practitioners, have been clear for many decades that vaccines reduce infection and transmission rates, etc.
Vaccines didn't "cure Polio" in any absolute sense, but they did make it possible to suppress it until it no longer appeared "in the wild" .. until it came back again.
Free speech beats the alternative. But it's important to realise that just because the media (or anyone) confidently claims something doesn't mean it's true (not generally because they're lying, just because they're wildly overconfident), and that's still true when they tell you what they're saying is "the science".
> (US) Free speech beats the alternative(s).
Questionable.
> and that's still true when they tell you what they're saying is "the science".
Ditto "the earth is flat", "they are eating the cats", "it was a lab leak", .. etc.
These are opinions not science.
did you set up an independent printing press and the government came to shut you down? if so, yes, your right to free speech was indeed gravely violated!
> And we have -- we can kind of almost see the end. We`re vaccinating so very fast, our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick, and that it`s not just in the clinical trials but it`s also in real world data.
This quote is literally from the director of the CDC (source in comment above). I mean.. who better to 'trust'?
Do we have studies for this that compare two controlled groups in same environment?
Don't fotget about "accidents" that spread Polio by vaccination on 120000 children, like Cutter incident.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutter_Laboratories
> Do we have studies for this
For many values of 'this' in the medical domain, yes.
> Don't fotget about "accidents" that spread Polio by vaccination
Err, the Cutter incident spread Polio via live polio virus rather than by Polio vaccination.
Absolutely an example of a serious and deadly Quality Control f*ckup that led to a complete change in how vaccine production was approached.
Please, link those studies.
> Do we have studies for this that compare two controlled groups in same environment?
are you questioning the link between vaccines and polio almost entirely disappearing from all but about 4 countries on the planet?
what alternative "theory" do you have in this case?
Increasing wealth and overall hygiene.
99% polio cases are nowadays in developing countries.
so because the science was reported sloppily, we can't trust science - instead of educating people?
We can't trust people who say "the science" is on their side. We can't trust popular science reporting. If you want to know what the science actually says, you have to dig into it yourself and e.g. read some papers (and even that might not be enough - you have to know which journals are credible and which aren't).
But you can trust uncle Donny who comes up with crackpot theories 24/7?
It's the ups and downs from believing those ideas that people live for. They're all chasing a feeling, which is the basis of all addiction.
That sloppy reporting _is_ the educating of people.
Which science don't you trust, the science that once said smoking is harmless or the science which currently says smoking is harmful? Or do you cover all your bases and just not trust science regardless?
"The science" never said that smoking is harmless. Concerns were being raised as early as the 1930s and epidemiological evidence had conclusively demonstrated the link between tobacco smoking, lung cancer and cardiovascular disease by the early 1950s. The tobacco industry pursued a relentless campaign to cast doubt on that science, which was so successful that even today people imagine that there was once an actual controversy.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2085438/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Frank_Statement
The tobacco industry also shifted to the most deadly form, cigarettes. Casual low use cigar smokers that don't inhale ( proper way to smoke cigar ) iirc have lower lung cancer and higher life expectancy than non smokers. Pipes and cigar were generally better especially when used in moderation even against moderate cigarette smoking.
Although generally the US just has bad tobacco habits. 'European' style smoking of a cigarette with coffee a couple times a week likely will kill you slower than whatever was going to get you like cooking and eating smoky grilled meats.
It’s a category error. “Science” doesn’t have a pope. It isn’t whatever the latest scientist says. Science is a process for figuring things out.
Was there ever any sustained science that claimed smoking was harmless? AFAIU, smoking was considered by the general population as not good for you health since at least the early 20th century, and before then as at least a vice (as was caffeine!). By mid century there was sustained scientific output showing clear links to cancer, solidifying cigarettes as an acute hazard to your health even if the scope and magnitude of the harms were less than we know today. Tobacco companies and their defenders countered this sentiment using the same tools used today--dissembling, whataboutism, and your basic FUD techniques. You can't look at ads promoting cigarettes and assume most people accepted what they're communicating at face value.
Anyhow, almost everybody knows today that, for example, eating too much sugar is bad for you, but the majority of the population still does it. That's how humans behave. Often times people do something because it's bad, taboo, or dangerous. And not everybody centers their lifestyle around good health; some people are just trying to get through the day. Today we still have doctors who smoke, dentists who drink soda, etc, though those particular vices are less popular than they once were. And let's not forget, while cigarette smoking has been in free fall doctors have been happily handing out prescriptions to smoke marijuana, even though inhaling marijuana smoke is at least as harmful as cigarettes (most people smoke it less frequently, but that's beside the point). Just because something is accepted as normal doesn't mean the harms are being outright denied.
One who believes in that line trusts neither, one imagines. The thing that people often misunderstand about not trusting something is that it is different from believing it is guaranteed to be wrong. Not trusting something means that it doesn't provide evidence. i.e. if you don't trust some source X, and X provides some evidence X_A about some event A then not trusting them means that P(A|X_A) ~= P(A) your prior probability.
People often interpret the "I don't trust X" statement to be "belief in the opposite", i.e. P(¬A|X_A) = 1. This is obviously stupid since someone you distrust could happily manufacture evidence for ¬A and then you'd conclude P(¬¬A|X_¬A) = 1 so they could make you believe anything, which is obviously not something you want someone you distrust to do to you.
I'm not sure that's correct in practice. The people that harbor vocal distrust in agencies, professions, etc. really do seem more apt to directly believe whatever is in opposition to the "distrusted" message. While your proposal remains a logical alternative to them, adoption seems markedly low.
Nah, they "believe" in that line when the science says anything that contradicts their priors. When the science says anything that confirms them they ingest and cite it gladly.