Broadcasters who did cigarette commercials (You'd be surprised at some of them)

[MattParker]

Being a baby boomer, I remember the many TV commercial campaigns for cigarettes in the 1960s, before they were prohibited. I recall the catchy jingle for "Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should" ... and the blatantly sexist: "Lucky Strike separates the men from the boys, but not from the girls..." ,,implying that smoking Lucky's was not only macho, but it would attract women...presumably because Lucky Strike cigs didn't have filters, which meant that men were macho because they were inhaling all the tars and nicotine, unlike '------' smokers who smoked filter cigarettes.

Definitely the primary example of the evils of advertising.

No, the suggestion was the women liked the smell of Luckies (in contrast to cigars and other cigarettes with an aroma some women found distasteful). This is a theme Lucky Strike had used some 40 years before when it ran ads with a man smoking and a woman next to him saying, "Blow some my way."

 

[trusty]

One thing that seemed downright WEIRD when I was a kid was the dancing Old Gold cigarette boxes. All you could see of the dancers were the legs - and those were nice legs! ;D

 

[mleach]

No, the suggestion was the women liked the smell of Luckies (in contrast to cigars and other cigarettes with an aroma some women found distasteful).

Which OTOH by the late 60's and through the 70's kinda changed it seemed that more and more women were into cigars or at least enjoyed men who smoked such things ( Tiperillo cigars for example ), There was one ad on You Tube where I can remember watching manyyears ago from the mid 70's for Winchester Little Cigars ( NASTY STUFF BTW ) the scene where the "cowboy" fires one up, the look on the woman's eyes..well lets just say I was suprised that she didn't yank her clothes off.

 

[LKellerIII]

No, the suggestion was the women liked the smell of Luckies (in contrast to cigars and other cigarettes with an aroma some women found distasteful).

Which OTOH by the late 60's and through the 70's kinda changed it seemed that more and more women were into cigars or at least enjoyed men who smoked such things ( Tiperillo cigars for example ), There was one ad on You Tube where I can remember watching manyyears ago from the mid 70's for Winchester Little Cigars ( NASTY STUFF BTW ) the scene where the "cowboy" fires one up, the look on the woman's eyes..well lets just say I was suprised that she didn't yank her clothes off.

We should make an important distinction here, and specify that "more and more women were into cigars or at least enjoyed men who smoked such things" in adverstising - not in real life. Cigars - even those little cigarillo things - never caught on with women because they taste too strong, and do NOT smell good - they smell like burning sewage.

I was briefly into smoking Hav-A-Tampa small cigars about 1970, but stopped when I realized that they killed my sense of taste, and if anything, we're a serious girl repellant.

Some pipe tobaccos are aromatic and have a nice smell. Cigars - no.

 

[bpatrick]

Who are some of the people (with a name you know) who sold cancer sticks on TV (or radio)?

Some that come to mind....

Mike Wallace (spokesman for Parliament)
Edward R Murrow (didn't read copy but displayed a Pall Mall pack and smoked the product on air)
Walter Cronkite (read Winston copy on the CBS Morning Show but did correct an ungrammatical slogan)
Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore (did cigarette commercials shown in the Dick Van Dyke Show)
Phil Silvers (did Camels commercials in You'll Never Get Rich)
Jack Webb (did Chesterfield and Fatima pitches in the original Dragnet)
Lee Marvin (did commercials for Pall Mall while they sponsored M Squad)
Fred Flintstone (did Winston commercials during original network run of The Flintstones)

And Yul Brynner and William Talman (the DA on Perry Mason) did anti-smoking spots before their deaths from lung cancer.

Any others?

In his autobiography, "This Laugh Is On Me," Silvers told how R.J. Reynolds bought the Bilko show after seeing the pilot; the audience (primarily male) was its target audience. He said they liked for him to do the Camel commercials because "he really bit into the cigarettes".

After the death of his son Peter in a mountain-climbing accident in Greece, Mike Wallace gave up his job as Parliament's spokesperson (as well as the chance to host "Match Game"--what a different show it would have been with him instead of Gene Rayburn as host, but I digress); he felt the best tribute he could pay his deceased son was to become a straight newscaster; I think he gave up his talk show "PM East" (if it hadn't already been canceled).

And didn't Morton Downey Jr. do an anti-smoking spot before his death?

 

[Silkie]

Wolfman Jack advertised KOOL and Colt 45 Malt Liquor, baby (or was it Country Club Malt Liquor?).

 

[mleach]

We should make an important distinction here, and specify that "more and more women were into cigars or at least enjoyed men who smoked such things" in adverstising - not in real life. Cigars - even those little cigarillo things - never caught on with women because they taste too strong, and do NOT smell good - they smell like burning sewage.

I was briefly into smoking Hav-A-Tampa small cigars about 1970, but stopped when I realized that they killed my sense of taste, and if anything, we're a serious girl repellant.

Some pipe tobaccos are aromatic and have a nice smell. Cigars - no.

Which reminds me of a story my brother-in-law had once told me about the time he had attented a bachelor party which had taken place at a local strip club. Halfway during the show some guy within the party had lit up a cigar thinking it was Ok since just about everyone else there at the party were smoking cigarettes anyway. The dj notices the man with the cigar, he then cuts off the music and then orders the naked girls ( about 10 of them ) off stage and then says over the sound system "...Sir..go ahead and enjoy your cigar..we won't keep you". With just about everyone in the entire bar watching him smoke his cigar he got the message. He put it out and then switched to a marlboro and the girls returned to the stage.

A year later the county the bar was in had outlawed smoking all together even in strip clubs.

 

[Bob1370]

"For what it's worth, I believe Mike Wallace was the spokesman for Parliament cigarettes in the 1950s or very early 60s - before he became associated with hard news and years before 60 Minutes."

And when he joined CBS News, right after completing the early 1960s syndicated "Biography" series for David Wolper Productions, Wallace literally had to pay the cigarette company, and the ad agency that produced and placed the spots, to take the Parliament spots permanently off the air. The issue wasn't that it was a cigarette ad campaign per se. One of the things CBS demanded (rightly) was that he never appear in any announcement endorsing any commercial product whatsoever, so that his news work would be considered commercially unbiased. They had imposed an edict that all CBS News personnel refrain from any commercial endorsements whatsoever. All the other networks had, and still have, a similar policy. (I'm sure CBS also wanted full latitude to sell time on CBS News broadcasts to any and all comers including other cigarette firms...but Wallace was happy to comply in order to purge any trace of commercial bias from his image as a newsman.)

 

[Silkie]

...and to think that newscasters had their cigarettes and martinis while delivering the news to our living rooms, as polite dinner guests, in the 1950s and early 1960s. Ah, but those days are long gone. Now they just shove an agenda in your face.

Goodnight, Chet.
Goodnight, David.

 

[Ultimajock]

Wolfman Jack advertised KOOL and Colt 45 Malt Liquor, baby (or was it Country Club Malt Liquor?).

...surviving airchecks of his XERB Hollywood show contain spots for all three products. However, by the time Wolfman Jack started appearing on TV, the cigarette ban was long in existence...

 

[LKellerIII]

We should make an important distinction here, and specify that "more and more women were into cigars or at least enjoyed men who smoked such things" in adverstising - not in real life. Cigars - even those little cigarillo things - never caught on with women because they taste too strong, and do NOT smell good - they smell like burning sewage.

I was briefly into smoking Hav-A-Tampa small cigars about 1970, but stopped when I realized that they killed my sense of taste, and if anything, we're a serious girl repellant.

Some pipe tobaccos are aromatic and have a nice smell. Cigars - no.

Which reminds me of a story my brother-in-law had once told me about the time he had attented a bachelor party which had taken place at a local strip club. Halfway during the show some guy within the party had lit up a cigar thinking it was Ok since just about everyone else there at the party were smoking cigarettes anyway. The dj notices the man with the cigar, he then cuts off the music and then orders the naked girls ( about 10 of them ) off stage and then says over the sound system "...Sir..go ahead and enjoy your cigar..we won't keep you". With just about everyone in the entire bar watching him smoke his cigar he got the message. He put it out and then switched to a marlboro and the girls returned to the stage.

A year later the county the bar was in had outlawed smoking all together even in strip clubs.

Funny, but not surprising. I was walking my dog in the park near my house the other day. A guy smoking a cigar was up there with his dog, too. Most of the other people around were giving him disgusted looks and staying about 200 feet away from him. They were acting like the guy had dipped himself from head to toe in sh*t. And this was outdoors.

 

[Ultimajock]

...Tom Snyder once told me that part of the "hate" side of the love/hate relationship most people at ABC had with Howard Cosell was the fact that he would smoke his cigars anywhere inside the ABC offices in New York that he damn well pleased -- including the elevators. Cosell knew he was too valuable to the sports division for anyone to complain and make it stick with the ABC brass...

 

[MHB]

And didn't Morton Downey Jr. do an anti-smoking spot before his death?

He did, according to his website.

http://www.mortondowneyjrhome.com/images/scrapbook/scrapbook5.jpg

He became a prominent anti-smoking advocate and testified before Congress.

 

[mleach]

...Tom Snyder once told me that part of the "hate" side of the love/hate relationship most people at ABC had with Howard Cosell was the fact that he would smoke his cigars anywhere inside the ABC offices in New York that he damn well pleased -- including the elevators. Cosell knew he was too valuable to the sports division for anyone to complain and make it stick with the ABC brass...

Reminds me of watching E !! back in the late 90s when it seems so many actors and singers at the time were into cigars. Everyone it seemed from Will Smith, Ben Affleck and Christian Slater to Tim McGraw, Kid Rock and N'Sync were seen smoking cigars..even during the interviews and of course the look on the faces of those who had asked the questions...**priceless**.