Watching ancient cigarette commercials on YouTube a few days ago, I wondered if there any countries where cigarette advertising on television is still commonplace or legal.
Do cigarette commercials still air on television anywhere? I’m guessing Russia, maybe the Stan countries, somewhere in Asia like Thailand, Vietnam or Mongolia, and probably some African countries.
Don’t know about actual cigarette commercials. They were banned in the U.S. in the very early 70s. But there was a lot of product placement. I once read (sometime in the 90s) that Phillip Morris was the biggest spender in the U.S. on television advertising. I could only figure that to mean that it was from product placement, since there were no more commercials.
You don’t see it now, but I remember the camera lingering on cigarette ads in store windows, etc. that had to be a paid advertisement. Or, mostly in movies, the camera would get a good clear shot of a pack of cigarettes as a character took one out to light up. (Nowadays, anytime cigarettes appear, they always seem to be the fictional Morley brand made famous by the X-Files).
The one example I can think of was in National Lampoon’s Vacation. In a hotel scene, Clark Griswold’s wife is laying in bed reading a magazine, and there’s a Merit ad on the back cover. The camera was more focused on the ad than it was on her while she was delivering her lines.
Neat references, but I’m thinking about actual cigarette commercials during television commercial breaks. They still gotta’ exist somewhere, I would think.
No, not really. A survey of Wikipedia and some Googling indicates that most countries with any significant TV viewership banned tobacco ads on TV a long time ago; Japan, for instance, in 1998. More recently, and partly due to a recent treaty on tobacco control, most nations are also restricting other forms of promotion.