The slogan “You’ve come a good distance, child” nonetheless has some pop-cultural forex. However what number of Individuals below the age of sixty keep in mind what it marketed? The road was first rolled out in 1968 to advertise Virginia Slims, the then-new model of cigarettes marketed explicitly to girls. “Each advert within the marketing campaign put a lady entrance and middle, equating smoking Virginia Slims with being unbiased, trendy, assured and liberated,” says the American Affiliation of Promoting Businesses. “The slogan itself spoke straight concerning the progress girls throughout America had been combating for.”
Such was the zeitgeist energy of Virginia Slims that they grew to become the final cigarette model ever marketed on American TV, at 11:59 p.m on January 2, 1971, throughout The Tonight Present Starring Johnny Carson. Richard Nixon had signed the Public Well being Cigarette Smoking Act, which banned cigarette ads on broadcast media, on April 1, 1970. Nevertheless it didn’t take impact instantly, the tobacco business having managed to barter for itself one final probability to air commercials throughout the faculty soccer video games of New 12 months’s Day 1971.
“The Philip Morris firm has purchased all industrial time on the primary half hour of all of the community discuss reveals tonight,” says ABC’s Harry Reasoner on a newscast from that very same day. “That’s, the final half hour on which it’s authorized to promote cigarettes on radio or tv in the US. This marks, as we wish to say, the tip of an period.” In tribute, ABC put collectively an assemblage of previous cigarette commercials. That some will really feel oddly acquainted even to these of us who wouldn’t be born for a decade or two speaks to the facility of mass media in postwar America. Greater than half a century later, now that cigarettes are seldom glimpsed even on dramatic tv, all this feels nearly surrealistically distant in historical past.
Equally hanging, actually against this to the way of reports anchors within the twenty-twenties, is the poetry of Reasoner’s reflection on the just-closed chapter of tv historical past. “It isn’t like saying goodbye to an previous pal, I suppose, as a result of the docs have satisfied us they aren’t previous pals,” he admits. “However we could also be pardoned, I feel, on dim winter nights sooner or later, sitting by the fireplace and nodding and saying, ‘Keep in mind L.S./M.F.T.? Keep in mind Glen Grey taking part in smoke rings for the Camel caravan? Keep in mind ‘Nature within the uncooked is seldom delicate’? Keep in mind all these women who who had all of it collectively?’”
Associated content material:
When the Flintstones Peddled Cigarettes
Cigarette Commercials from David Lynch, the Coen Brothers and Jean Luc Godard
Two Brief Movies on Espresso and Cigarettes from Jim Jarmusch & Paul Thomas Anderson
Wonderful Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Advertisements for Beer, Smokes & Sake (1902-1954)
How Edward Munch Signaled His Bohemian Revolt with Cigarettes (1895): A Video Essay
Primarily based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and tradition. His initiatives embody the Substack publication Books on Cities, the e book The Stateless Metropolis: a Stroll by way of Twenty first-Century Los Angeles and the video sequence The Metropolis in Cinema. Comply with him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Fb, or on Instagram.