TOBACCO MAKER RUNS ANTI-ANTI-SMOKING ADS

Go ahead, light up a cigarette. Why? Because a bunch of just-say-no health
cops as old as your parents don't want you to!

In a notable shift of marketing strategy, the No. 2 U.S. tobacco company
has launched new advertisements for their much-vilified cigarettes that
challenge anti-smoking activists as killjoys and prudes who deserve
defiance and ridicule.

The new approach to selling cigarettes could complicate the task of
public-health officials in trying to persuade young people not to smoke.
The latest ads seek to enhance smoking's image as a forbidden fruit, and
could make heavy-handed anti-smoking propaganda rebound to the tobacco
industry's advantage, some public-health experts say.

A new advertising campaign for Camel and a successful, year-old campaign
for Winston - both brands of No. 2 manufacturer R.J. Reynolds Tobacco -
have taken the gloves off in attacking what the ads suggest are
puritanical, prohibitionist attitudes of tobacco foes.

The new Camel advertisements feature mock warnings headlined "Viewer
Discretion Advised," which appear along with the legally required health
warning. "At least you can still smoke in your own car," declares one
billboard for Winston's so-called "No Bull" campaign. "Judge me all you
want, just keep the verdict to yourself," says another.

A colorful, three-page Camel ad introduced in national magazines last month
shows a shotgun-wielding farmer chasing from his house a young man whom he
clearly has just caught in bed with his beautiful daughter. The shapely,
blond daughter, draped in a bedsheet, is smoking a cigarette; her attitude
is titillatingly described as: "Satisfied smoking."

The furious farmer, a comic figure in his floppy-eared hat, might be
interpreted as standing for the anti-smoking forces.

"That's me," Robert Kline, director of the Tobacco Control Legal Clinic at
the Northeastern University School of Law, says ruefully. "They're poking
fun, which is an effective advertising technique."

Public-health advocates seem particularly disturbed by Camel's
pseudo-warnings, which not only echo the health warning but resemble the
ratings that rank movies and television shows as inappropriate for children.

"Implicitly, this mocks the campaign to keep children from smoking," Dr.
John Slade, a veteran anti-tobacco activist at the Robert Wood Johnson
Medical Center in New Jersey, says of Camel's campaign. "The industry is,
in effect, toying with us."

Not so, says Fran Creighton, Reynolds' marketing vice president for Camel.
"We would never make fun of the cigarette health warning," she says. "This
is maybe more about the PC (politically correct) world we live in. The
world has an authoritarian view on everything."

"It's a lot easier to sell rebellion than to sell nonrebellion," says Bill
Novelli, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. "They'll always
score with something that has fatalism, edge, gallows humor."

Reynolds' anti-anti-smoking slogans follow a change of strategy last year
by top tobacco executives, who for the first time publicly acknowledged
that smoking causes deadly illness. While previously industry spokesmen
would admit only a "statistical association" between smoking and disease,
Leary said, "It's been known for decades that smoking cigarettes is
dangerous."

The shift of stance liberates marketers, who now can use the danger of
smoking in their pitches. One new Winston ad associates cigarettes with
fried food, another target of health advocates.

Reynolds spokesmen, wary of the accusations of targeting children that
dogged the company for years, use the phrase "adult smoker" in almost every
sentence. They point out that the new Camel ads have run in such magazines
as Vanity Fair, GQ, Esquire and Car & Driver, by no means children's
publications. The edgiest of the Winston ads have run in alternative
weeklies, whose readers are youthful but mostly over 18.