Advertising has come a long way since the days when they'd just brashly trumpet the superiority of the product in a general way, saying things like: Buy this doohickey right now. It will improve your life immeasurably and finally make you the person you strive to be. It's so inexpensive we have literally starved our children that you may afford it, and it makes the earlier version of it that we tried to sell you yesterday look like an old dried-up dog turd. Buy it NOW or become that which you hate and revile.
Women were directly targeted in certain magazines and on daytime TV, children on Saturday mornings, and everything else was directed toward men in a pretty general way. Now, of course, through complicated demographic analysis, trend monitoring, social media profiles, and (probably) brain implants and drone surveillance, advertising is a much more specialized and scientific endeavor. Whereas in the past an ad might be directed toward, say, "white people with jobs," nowadays an advertiser will say something like, "Okay, our target is this guy named Caleb," and they will bombard his consciousness through minutely focused broadsides wherever his eyes and ears land. If you don't like it, tough shit. That's the price you pay for all the porn and cat videos and passive aggression that has so vastly improved all our lives.
Even ads that appear to go out to a general audience, such as those on broadcast TV, are painstakingly tailored to the specific population segments they serve. For instance, an upscale car ad doesn't so much tell the narrow sliver of the car-buying public that this is the car for them as much as it screams to the rabble: This car is NOT for you. Look away, or watch if you must, if only to reinforce the ugly truth that you are unworthy of such grandeur. Which of course appeals mightily to the privileged, as the sweeter side of inclusion of the few is the exclusion of the many.
The producers of the things we buy, both the necessary and the (especially) frivolous, go to great lengths and spend vast sums to determine exactly who is buying their products, who is likely to, and who could be compelled to given the right impetus. I recently encountered a print ad that not only perfectly evinced these principles of targeted marketing, but addressed a segment of the population I naturally assumed advertisers would shy away from courting, at least directly — criminals, and it's true, most companies would — but then there's the tobacco industry. There may be depths to which they will not sink, but available well-digging technology has as yet been unable to locate that nadir.
Cigarettes inspire brand loyalty like no other product, and specific brands have become permanently associated with specific groups of people. For instance, Kools — the brand I was weaned on, back in the early 1970s — were the choice of the downtown pimps and hustlers I so admired, as well as junkies and racetrack touts. Newports have mostly supplanted Kools as the ghetto-fab puff of choice, but certain old-school urban types still adhere. Marlboros may well be favored by the cowboys they've identified themselves with, but they're mostly the choice of metalhead dirt merchants, tweakers, and trailer-park beauty queens. Camel Filters used to be strictly the province of housepainters, fishgutters, and underwear inspectors, at least until the 1980s when they wised up and began marketing to kids. Now they are, in all their multitude of flavors and configurations, the preferred smoke of teenage America.
Winstons, the subject of the ad in question, are and have always been the cigarette of criminals. You may think of them as the redneck's choice, and you'd be right — after all, they did for years sponsor the redneck raison d'etre, the NASCAR circuit (which, in an interesting parallel, was later branded by Sprint, whose devices are plastered to people’s faces with the same ubiquity as cigarettes were once jammed in them) — but it's not as if there isn't any overlap between the two groups. In fact, it's probably safe to say that Winston is the brand of criminal white trash.
In this ad, a young couple is depicted in the cockpit of an American car of probably 1970s vintage, neither of them wearing a seatbelt. The driver sports several days’ worth of stubble and an armful of prison tattoos visible as he lazily pilots the car with an elbow out the window, his other arm draped around the stripper next to him. Eyes at half-mast and gazing at nothing, probably whacked out on Oxys, she backhands a lit Winston into his mouth so he can keep a hand free to fiddle around in her halter top. Cheap silver jewelry drips off of her, and her hair is the brittle straw of a lifetime of peroxide. There are hints of items in the car which are not definitively, but certainly could be, a pistol and a beer. The tableau makes abundantly clear one thing: these two are on their way to murder someone.
This is no benign white-trash couple on their way to the flea market in search of bootleg videos and bulk tube socks. This is Mickey and Mallory out looking for victims.
The good people at Winston seem to have done their due diligence and sent teams of researchers out into the big wide to find out just who in the hell was buying their product. They discovered that an amalgam of your typical Winston enjoyer was a 32-year-old professional meth cook with a ninth grade education residing at Shady Acres Mobile Village with a rotating cast of common-law wives, and rather than attempting a rebrand to attract a more wholesome clientele, chose to run with it and actively solicit the business of these simple folk.
Hey, I get it. You're probably not going to find a more loyal consumer base. This is not a demographic that's going to let a thing like pregnancy or cancer interfere with their right to enjoy the smooth, rich flavor of their favorite cigarette.
I personally chucked the gaspers 23 years ago this June, but before that I spent an equal amount of time puffing away. As previously mentioned, I cut my teeth on Kools, but experimented with a number of different brands throughout my smoking career. You may recall, but probably don't, the brief appearance of Lemon Twists in 1973, a slender, lemon-infused smoke aimed at, now that I think about it, the lavender market. I thought they were tres sophisticated and enjoyed their fleeting run.
A couple of years later, I picked up a brand called Fact:, whose colon meant to set off a list of actual health benefits derived from smoking them. Not actual facts, I still, as a credulous teen, enjoyed them and sneered at the fools still smoking unhealthy cigarettes.
Always a sucker for novelty, I tried both Mores and Saratogas, the 120mm, super-slim, dark-brown smokes. Multicolored Shermans caught my eye at one point but I couldn’t sustain the cost.
English Ovals, in rugby-ball cross-section, were odd enough to capture my attention for a while, as was the maritime motif and classy box of Player's Navy Cut. Eventually, though, I settled into a persona and accepted my lot as a Winston man. Although I recalled and relied upon their 1960s advertising campaign as the cigarette of people who didn 't give a damn about grammar to defend my choice, I knew in my heart that my propensity for crystal meth and avocation as a part-time sneak thief were what really bonded me to the brand.
You can try to smoke against type, but your inclinations will betray you.
For instance, if a grease monkey steps out into the sunlight from the repair bay for a break and excavates from his coveralls not the expected box of reds but a Benson and Hedges Menthol Light 100, the supposition will be that he has mined the glove box of the Buick Century belonging to the visored-and-pant-suited old lady that he's working on.
Or if a frat boy decides to cap off his date rape with a smoke and instead of a Marlboro Light, pulls out a bag of Drum and a pack of Clubs. What’s going on here? Did he rape a hippie earlier and confiscate his makings as the spoils d'amour? I hate to rush to judgment, but yes, that is what happened.
The point is, you don't so much choose your cig brand as it chooses you, through a gradual winnowing process of experimentation and peer pressure.
After stubbing out that last Winston back in 1995 I gave up smoking but not nicotine, swapping out the box for a can of Skoal, which of course opens up a whole new can of identity worms. Until recently, smokeless tobacco was strictly the province of slack-jawed yokels, NASCAR drivers, enthusiasts, wives, and children, and rednecks and hillbillies of all stripe. I fear that preceding list may be a case of pleonastic excess, but never mind. You qet the picture.
But nowadays, as the social standing of smokers hovers just above child murderers, a whole new generation of stealth tobacco users have given it a veneer of respectability. Of a sort.
The spitting is, naturally, a problem and admittedly disgusting, but I personally find the essence soothing to my constitution and have always gutted it. People react in horror and imagine all sorts of dire consequences to my innards, cancer and corrosion and the like, but I believe I have made clear my opinion of the ability of adulterants to penetrate my defenses.
Having been tobacco-free for nearly seven years and with a general physiology restored to showroom condition, it would be the sensible thing to let be, be and not pick it up again, and I'm considering it. Being straight-edged from top to toe is a great way to weaponize virtue — but then aqain, my two favorite -ines, caffe- and nicot-, are pretty much without peer as day starters.
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