This was written for the University subject, BCM110.
Oh, how time makes certain things of the past look silly, foolish or just plain outlandish. It's strange to think that the actor in this ad would go on to become the President of the United States of America, and it's also strange to think that there was a time where smoking was advertised as a perfectly fine thing that didn't make your lungs decay, your teeth fall out along with other un-pleasantries that I will not go into detail about here.Suffice to say that, many years ago, it was perfectly fine for advertisers to talk about the cooling taste or the flavour of a cigarette. And it wasn’t just ads. Smoking became a part of popular culture and entertainment. Just take a look at some Hanna-Barbara cartoons like Tom and Jerry, The Flintstones and Scooby Doo whose characters would occasionally smoke or even sometimes talk about their favourite brand of cigarette. These scenes, funnily enough, which depicted characters smoking were later removed or edited out when broadcasted years later.
And The Marlboro Man? That icon of ‘smoking and masculinity’ in advertisement? Well, apparently, many of the actors who played the Marlboro Man died…of diseases related to smoking.
Yikes.
But unlike advertisements that are supposed to be shocking and controversial (thereby grabbing your attention), this sort of ad degrades and is seen in a new light, years in the future.
It might have seemed perfectly innocuous at the time: “give all your friends Chesterfield cigarettes for Christmas, and have a happy new year!” But today, science and society has caught up with smoking. Advertisements proclaiming the value, taste and goodness of a cigarette have been banned in the United States since 1970 with the passing of the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act of 1969, ‘a comprehensive Federal program to deal with cigarette labelling and advertising with respect to any relationship between smoking and health..’ (U.S. Congress, 1969).
This was followed by similar acts in various other countries. Cigarette packets now show, in detail, the effects that smoking has on the body. We now are all aware of the dangerous chemicals within cigarettes and how you might as well be scraping up parts of a road, rolling that up and smoking it.
But this ad is not just from a different time. It feels like it comes from a completely alien world.
The bright colours, the cheery atmosphere and the merriment of Christmas time is almost sinister when viewed through the lens of the modern day.
But, who knows? Maybe in a few years or a few decades time, there’ll be something today which is seen as harmless that will no longer be viewed as such. It could be something physical like cigarettes or it could even be something as abstract and conceptual as an ideology or a facet of an ideology.
Only time will tell…
…and when it comes to advertisements, time really likes to throw a spanner in the works.
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