Every Cigarette Smoked in Mad Men

That's a lot of puff-puff, and nice work by Whirled.

The drinking and smoking are integral to Mad Men, and not just because it's a gesture of fidelity to a period. There's a close association between creatives and artists. In those two camps, you've always got this tragic notion of burning on both ends: being constantly hopped up on something and doing your job anyway - maybe even needing the former for the latter.

Also, still fresh out of Cannes, I can attest that this attitude, this lifestyle, is still alive and well in the industry. (The hyperlinked post is about people discussing ways to quit, but that's also part of the mantle of smoking.) The world may have moved on, but the lone creative still gets something out of lighting one up. It's a legacy, nicotine-laced shackles of genius and suffering that bind us not just to Don Draper but to Mark Twain and Sartre.*

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Conversations on Quitting the Cancer Stick

In advertising, we pick up a lot of habits - "creative" habits, mostly - that we occasionally are and aren't proud of, depending on our mood and who's looking. The Cannes Lions becomes a magnifier of all those habits: there, trapped in paradise for a week, people don't just drink until 5 in the morning; they often smoke as if all the weight of the world depends on it.

"Last night I knew it was time to go home because I started chainsmoking," complained Shannon Stephaniuk of Glossy. "I hate smoking more than anything else in the world!"

I suppose I believe her. I've never seen Shannon pick up a cigarette, not once, and I smoke a great deal, which usually outs the casual smokers in party atmospheres.

Anyway, this Cannes phenomenon leads to a lot of semi-casual conversation about why we all started smoking in the first place, which naturally drifts over to quitting and efforts to get there.

This is why I started smoking (in earnest, not counting the flirtation I had in college when my best friend gave me a pack of Vanilla Dreams for my 18th birthday): to eke a promotion out of a boss who only discussed "the future" with his subordinates during smoke breaks. I was 19, maybe 20.

"You know what Gabriel Garcia Marquez did to quit?" began Draftfcb ECD Mark Fiddes, rather grandly, at a beachside luncheon for production firm Mad Cow. "Gabriel Garcia Marquez buried his last packet of cigarettes. Big mound. It was something he could walk by and look at every day."

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'Smoking Makes You a Slave to Tobacco.'

This campaign for BDDP & Fils for Association Droits des Non-Fumeurs just rubs me all kinds of wrong. Associating smoking with blowing Big Tabac, okay, whatever. But then taking the great grand leap into sex slavery?

I mean, really?

Via.

Debutantes, Light Up: The Very First Flashmob?

Following the release of AdVerve's "Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms" episode, a PR guy sent me the above Chesterfield ad from the 1930s.

It speaks to the empowerment women felt when they lit up a smoke -- repurcussions of a marketing campaign I mentioned in passing during the podcast, when, around the time of woman's suffrage, a tobacco company encouraged a number of wealthy debutantes to light up on the streets at exactly the same time.

That's pretty much all I knew about the effort, but after seeing the Chesterfield ad I decided to look it up. Here's what I found:

It was George Washington Hill, president of the American Tobacco Company, who recognised that an important part of his market was not being tapped into, and he hired [Freud's nephew Edward Bernays] to expand the sales of his Lucky Strike cigarettes to women.

Bernays applied his talent to the problem. Recognising that women were still riding high on the suffrage movement, Bernays used this as the basis for his campaign. He consulted Dr A A Brill, a leading New York psychoanalyst, to find out the psychological basis for women's smoking. Brill said that cigarettes were equated subconsciously with penises, which women were envious of.

He gave Bernays the idea that, if he could connect cigarettes with the idea of challenging male power, smoking in public could be sold to women, who would then have their own penises. So he came up with an idea for presenting cigarettes as 'torches of freedom'.

Bernays proceeded to stage an event at the annual Easter Day Parade, held in New York and attracting thousands, to introduce this totally irrational notion to American womanhood and it caused a national stir. He got a group of rich debutantes to agree to hide cigarettes in their clothing and, at a given signal, light up together.

He then informed the press this would happen and of course photographers were present in droves and stories appeared in newspapers throughout America.

- Adam Curtis, "A Seething Mass of Desires: Freud's Hold Over History"

This all went down in the mid-1920s; thereafter, Bernays was able to persuade female film stars to light up -- resulting in the adoption of cigarettes among US women in the millions. The big takeaway: in one fell swoop, smoking was successfully linked to "feelings of independence, power and freedom" among those that so needed it.

Does this not astound and amaze? And doesn't the image of smug untouchable rich girls on the street puff-puffing in tandem totally blow away this nonsense? (Not endorsing one or the other; just sayin'.)