The tobacco industry doesn’t do much newspaper advertising these days, so it was noticeable when ads for R.J. Reynolds products began appearing in The N&O recently.
The company has run two ads for its Kool XL cigarettes in the past month in The N&O’s What’s Up section. It’s also been promoting Camel Snus, a smokeless tobacco product, over the last several months.
The Kool ad was not cool with some readers. “Perhaps I was naive, but in view of the News & Observer’s editorial support of smoke-free air laws, I didn’t expect you to be so hypocritical as to seek advertising revenues from the promotion of smoking,” Michael Schwalbe, of Chapel Hill, wrote in an e-mail.
Sherryl Kleinman, also of Chapel Hill, noted that the full-page Kool ad ran adjacent to the “Back-to-School College Survival Guide” in the What’s Up section — which is The N&O’s entertainment section targeted to a younger demographic. “Is it a coincidence that the ad runs in conjunction with a story on college fashion?” she asked. “I doubt it. Given many college-age students’ investment in looking cool, what could be better advertising than running an ad for a harmful product called KOOL?”
You don’t see much cigarette advertising in the media these days. Broadcast advertising of tobacco products has been banned by the federal government since 1971. The 1999 national tobacco settlement banned billboard advertising. It’s still legal in newspapers, but tobacco companies in recent years have shunned newspapers in favor of more targeted advertising, such as in-store promotions and direct mail.
“I think it was more of a strategic decision that they got more bang for their buck out of point-of-purchase, Internet and e-mail advertising, and slotting fees” for product placement in stores, said Paul Bloom, senior research scholar at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, who has studied the industry.
Jim McClure, The N&O’s vice president for display advertising, said the ads were the first for tobacco products that he could recall in perhaps three years.
He said he personally dislikes smoking, but that doesn’t stop The N&O from accepting tobacco advertising. It’s little different, he said, from running ads for other products that some readers might find objectionable, such as for alcohol or guns or, for that matter, bacon, which can also kill you. “Despite all the negatives that go with tobacco and the reaction to all that, it’s still a legal product,” he said.
McClure said withholding or banning ads because of its content would run counter to a newspaper’s commitment to an open and free exchange of ideas and information. As he wrote to one of the complaining readers: “There is a fine line between censoring ads and allowing ads to be published that might offend some readers. Our practice has been to err on the side of publishing advertising if it comes from a business that sells a legal product or service. Such is the case with the Kool cigarette ad.”
The newspaper has ultimate responsibility for what it publishes, in news or advertising, and it does routinely reject or require changes in ads. The test, McClure said, is whether the ad has content “that a significant number of our readers would find objectionable.” Examples: ads that make unreasonable claims for health or financial products, or suggestive content in “adult entertainment” ads. (As it happens, a reader called me Wednesday to complain about a “Topless Beach Party” ad in the sports section.)
No one objected to the Kool ad the first time it ran, nor to the dozen or so Snus ads. What made the Aug. 17 Kool ad so noticeable was its placement next to the college fashion section. McClure said that was happenstance, not intentional. The ad ran where it did, he said, because it was full color and press limitations dictate the pages where color can run.
Adrienne Johnson Martin, The N&O’s pop culture editor, sad she saw the Kool ad before publication and worried about its placement but was unable to move it because of the color issue. She said she and other editors do move ads from time to time that are inappropriate for the adjacent content. The N&O won’t, for instance, run a men’s club ad next to a high school sports story.
The placement might have been coincidental, but the ad’s location in the What’s Up section was not. A spokesman for R.J. Reynolds said the company was targeting “alt-weeklies” in its print advertising, because those readers are more likely to frequent the bar and nightclub scene where smoking is prevalent. David Howard said Kool XL and Camel Snus are new products that the RJR wants to market to that audience.
Howard said the company has reduced print advertising in recent years, in favor of other marketing such as direct mail and person-to-person marketing. But it will use “advertising vehicles that are communicating with the intended audience, adult tobacco consumers.” He said Reynolds has a policy that it will advertise only in media in which 85 percent of the audience is 18 and older. That’s the case with The News & Observer, although What’s Up skews younger.
Some newspapers do not accept tobacco advertising. The Charleston, S.C., News & Courier was one that I checked with last week that does not. The Washington Post does, said Advertising VP Katherine Weymouth, “but I cannot remember the last time we actually got one. Our general policy is that we will take an ad for services or products that are sold legally.”
Should The N&O join the newspapers that don’t accept tobacco ads? I don’t think so. It’s a slippery slope to ban one form of legal advertising while accepting others that may be as objectionable. I agree with McClure that restricting advertisements doesn’t conform with the free flow of information espoused by newspapers.
