The R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, a unit of Reynolds American, disclosed this week that it would run no ads in 2008 in consumer magazines and newspapers for cigarette brands like Camel, Winston and Pall Mall. Instead, Reynolds said it would concentrate its marketing in three areas that already make up the bulk of its marketing spending: stores, bars and nightclubs; Web sites; and direct mail.
Print ads are estimated to account for less than 5 percent of the hundreds of millions of dollars that Reynolds spends each year on marketing. The company also spends substantially on price cuts to retailers and wholesalers and special offers to consumers known as bogos, for buy one, get one free. Reynolds is the second-largest tobacco company in the United States, behind the Philip Morris USA unit of the Altria Group. Philip Morris has not bought print ads for its cigarettes in the last three years, so the decision by Reynolds suggests that next year consumers are likely to read cigarette ads from only the third-largest tobacco company, the Carolina Group, which makes Lorillard brands like Newport. Reynolds said its decision was not directly related to two recent disputes with politicians centered on magazine ads for its best-selling cigarette brand, Camel. One dispute was focused on an elaborate foldout ad for Camel Filters that ran in the Nov. 15 issue of Rolling Stone, featuring a campaign about independent music. The other dispute involved ads for Camel No. 9, a new variety of the brand aimed at women, that are running in a lengthy list of magazines. The print media, particularly glossy weekly and monthly magazines, were once a marketing mainstay for Reynolds and other tobacco companies like Philip Morris USA, Lorillard, Brown & Williamson and Liggett & Myers. For decades, the pages of publications like Collier’s, Life, Look, Newsweek, The Saturday Evening Post and Time were filled with ads telling smokers that “more doctors smoke Camel than any other cigarette,” that “L.S.M.F.T.” (for “Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco”), that smokers of Tareyton cigarettes would “rather fight than switch,” that Newport was “alive with pleasure” and that Chesterfield was “best for you.” Philip Morris stopped running many types of cigarette ads in the print media in 2000, announcing that it would no longer advertise in magazines like Rolling Stone and Sports Illustrated because they had many readers who were under the legal smoking age. In 2005 and 2006, Philip Morris ran no print ads of any kind for its cigarette brands, a spokesman in Richmond, Va., David Sylvia, said yesterday, and it does not appear that there will be any in 2007. The company executives decided to “reallocate our marketing resources,” Ms. Smith said yesterday in an interview, because “we believe that will allow us to be very efficient and effective in how we go to market.”
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