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Collection: More Doctors Smoke Camels
- Hilift 2y agoThe country was founded on tobacco. It was used as currency for the first 150 years.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y agoIf there’s any truth to the pop culture trope of trading cigarette cartons in prisons, it possibly never stopped being used as currency.
- bitmasher9 2y agoIt would be black market currency now. Most US jails and prisons ban cigarettes.
- failrate 2y agoCigarettes have been replaced with sealed packets of fish.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kaonwarb 2y agoThis 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-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/tobacco-money https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/dictionaries-thesauruse...
- aithrowawaycomm 2y agoIt 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."
- janalsncm 2y agoOne 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.
- magneticnorth 2y agoMy 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?
- whycome 2y agoYeah the magazine name (and target) would be essential context that should be preserved along with the images themselves.
- jdietrich 2y agoMarlboro 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-light/mild-as-may/ https://tobacco.stanford.edu/cigarettes/light-super-ultra-li...
- aliher1911 2y agoYou may want to search "Torches of Freedom" and go down that rabbit hole.
- ImHereToVote 2y agoThe 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.
- ajayvk 2y agoThe "Costlier Tobaccos" tag line looks strange now. Products which want to show sophistication no longer promote the fact that they are more expensive.
- lIl-IIIl 2y agoI 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..."
- Ekaros 2y agoI think modern term is "Premium". Which is more expensive than standard. Maybe it is more indirect, but it is very often there.
- hagbard_c 2y agoIn 60 years time it will look just as strange to see product advertisements from today boasting '10% reduced CO² impact' or 'climate neutral'. I don't have a clue what they'll advertise with by that time but I do know it will look strange to those about half a century later. The advertising industry was never about objective truth, always about subjective emotions and I do not see that change other than advertising becoming ever more targeted.
- freedomben 2y agoI 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.
- aweiland 2y agoWe 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.
- freedomben 2y agoIf you're interested in reliving those glory days, the heroes & legends at OTRR[1] have done a phenomenal job at gathering and fixing up the old audio. The actual files are on archive.org[2] [1] https://otrr.org/ https://otrr.org/ [2] https://archive.org/details/OTRR_Certified_Abbot_and_Costello https://archive.org/details/OTRR_Certified_Abbot_and_Costell...
- whycome 2y agoToday, the message is brought to you by fanduel and bet365
- austinprete 2y agoHmm, which one do more doctors use?
- ClassyJacket 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- paul7986 2y agoWhat 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?
- munchler 2y agoSocial media. I think many people already realize this, but it hasn’t yet hit a tipping point.
- paul7986 2y agoAnd 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.
- datavirtue 2y agoVisit 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.
- harvodex 2y agoAs 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.
- nicoburns 2y agoIn terms of things that we allow to be advertised but probably shouldn't: sodas, medical products, politicians.
- t0bia_s 2y agoCovid vaccines, sugar, plant meat...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mttpgn 2y agoAn 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.
- croemer 2y agoI 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.
- capnrefsmmat 2y agoIronically, 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 https://www.refsmmat.com/files/papers/huff.pdf
- thedailymail 2y agoI 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.
- musicale 2y agoBest for your Tumor zone!
- marcus0x62 2y agoIt'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.
- B1FF_PSUVM 2y ago> 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 ;-)
- marcus0x62 2y agoThere 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.
- bruce511 2y agoI 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 :)
- datavirtue 2y agoThey were also very strong and flavorful. Not something that a lot of people could handle.
- hackeraccount 2y agoThe 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.
- 331c8c71 2y ago> 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.
- ANewFormation 2y agoMost people it seems so know social media is bad for them. But people knowingly use many things that are bad for themselves.
- musicale 2y agoSocial media, hyper-palatable ultra-processed "foods" (see RJR Nabisco), etc.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- lolinder 2y ago> 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 https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/21/2/87
- HankB99 2y agoThe T Zone T is for Taste ... T is fore Throat Just wow.
- forgetfreeman 2y agoOh but it gets so much worse: https://tobacco.stanford.edu/cigarette/img0742/ https://tobacco.stanford.edu/cigarette/img0742/
- black_13 2y ago[dead]
- Fizzadar 2y agoHa! The first one is one of my favourite random images I’ve used as a test image for 10 years now carried between various laptops and PCs. Wonderful to see the full collection here.
- sparrish 2y agoAnd people wonder why others don't "trust the science".
- awnird 2y agoYou are confusing science with ad copy.
- adamc 2y agoNo, but the post implies a belief that many people will confuse the two. And it might be right.
- ajsnigrutin 2y agoThere was a lot of science paid by big tobacco (and big sugar and many others like hydrogenated fats), that then turned into ads.
- exe34 2y agothe antidote to bad science has always been more science by independent experts. what else would you suggest?
- ajsnigrutin 2y agoHe 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.com/transcripts/transcript-rachel-maddow-show-3-29-21-n1262442 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).
- aprilthird2021 2y ago> 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
- adamc 2y agoThe ethical standards of advertising are obviously very, very low.
- lnxg33k1 2y agoMuch 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
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoI 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.
- einpoklum 2y ago> 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.
- marcus0x62 2y ago> 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".
- Waterluvian 2y agoAds 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?
- vel0city 2y agoI 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 https://flickread.com/edition/html/676148065c1ba#1
- aspenmayer 2y agoI 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertorial
- pier25 2y agoNo website to check the details of a product either
- jdietrich 2y agoThe 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.
- f33d5173 2y agoUsually the copy is entirely devoid of "information" per se. It's a series of nice sounding but totally vacuous statements.