In this day and age, advertising is everywhere, such as newspaper advertising, product placement and internet advertising et al. And the aim of advertising is to stimulate sales and increase brand awareness. Moreover, consumers are subtly influenced by advertising, especially in matters of tobacco advertising. The tobacco industries make a huge profit from tobacco advertising.

Research-Says-Impact-of-FDA-Restrictions-on-Cigarette-Advertising-Near-Schools-Less-Than-Tobacco-Industry-Projects@@Russia-tobacco-law-health-176018

Tobacco advertising has a particularly close connection to the products of cigarette. It naturally uses tobacco advertising to attract consumers’ attention to sell the cigarette when cigarette production started commercially five hundred years ago. During the last decade of the 20th century, the trade mark of the famous cigarette’s products in the world, including Marlboro, Camel and Winston and so on, appeared in Hollywood movies (Keenan, E., 1985). Furthermore, there are many smoking scenes in most popular Hollywood movies (Eszterhas, J., 2005). Due to these smoking scenes, most teenagers and adolescences are encouraged to start smoking for the cool image of actors or actresses.

Marlboro is one of the most successful tobaccos advertising campaign in the world. To be more accurate, the brand of Marlboro has gained a huge profit from the advertising. Let’s review the old advertisement of Marlboro. On the vast western prairies, sturdy steeds are galloping on the grasslands. A western cowboy is riding a beautiful horse. Then, the camera obligingly pans his image. A heroic western cowboy takes a lit cigarette between his fingers (Old Marlboro Commercials, 2012). Next, the products of Marlboro are zoomed in the camera again, the striking design with the shape of a red V, the color of packaging between red and white and the brown filter of cigarette.

In this Marlboro advertisement, masculinity is related to smoking. What’s more, this behavior looks very cool so that people can be easily encouraged to imitate it and buy a packet of cigarettes, especially teenagers and adolescents. Also, it is interesting to note that the rank of Marlboro cigarettes’ sales volume shot to the top ten suddenly and kept this tendency, while Marlboro was being advertised on prime time. Therefore, it is clear that tobacco advertising contributes to the sales volume of cigarettes.

Even though tobacco advertising helps cigarette industries make a huge profit, it is still banned to curb the smoking behavior of young people. This is because, both non-smokers and smokers are stimulated to start smoking or smoking more after watching tobacco advertising, for the cool image in the advertising. (Tye, J. B., Warner, K. and Glantz, S. A. Winter, 1987) Due to the drawback of tobacco advertising, America banned broadcasting any tobacco advertising on Television from 1971 (Nelson, J. P., 2004). The European Union also persuaded to do the same thing in 2002, but it extended this ban to television and the internet to try and prevent teenagers’ from smoking (ASH, 2012).

To sum up, tobacco advertising helps cigarette companies make more profit. However, tobacco advertising is banned in most countries due to the fact that advertising actually promotes smoking and subsequently causes serious health problems.