Most smokers take their first, experimental puff before they reach adulthood — as children. Children enjoy cartoons. The spokesbeast for the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco company’s flagship brand, Camel, is a cartoon camel named Joe. He appears on billboards and in newspapers and magazines where unsuspecting minors might see and be influenced by him. Marketing practices that cause or are likely to cause substantial injury to unsuspecting consumers are illegal under federal law. Smoking injures humans. Therefore, Joe Camel is illegal.
That, at least, is the logic adopted late last month by the Federal Trade Commission. That body will now ask a federal judge to exile Joe to the adults- only advertising desert, where said dromedary will never again bare his nicotine-stained teeth at “our youth.” The FTC’s move is politically sophisticated, bundling a number of sure-fire elements — kids (good), cancer (bad), and a corporate logo as famous as any on earth — into an easily comprehensible two-minute news story.
But the FTC’s assault on Joe Camel is a crummy idea, just the same. The factual “findings” that justify the proposed ban proceed from questionable assumptions about the epidemiology of smoking, the operations of the tobacco industry, and the psychology of advertising. The implied regulatory theory under which the FTC claims authority to lasso Joe is alarmingly expansive. Worst of all, corralling the camel is probably useless, even counterproductive, as an anti-smoking initiative. Here, yet again, we have the essence of domestic-policy Clintonism: a gesture that polls well but doesn’t actually do anything serious — and, in any case, does what it does badly.
Through the 1950s, Camel was America’s favorite smoke. But as filter-tip cigarettes gained popularity in the 1960s, the brand began a long and steep decline. By the late 1980s, Philip Morris’s Marlboro label, the industry leader, had more than five times as many customers and thoroughly dominated the crucial market for 18-to-24-year-olds. Desperate for a solution, R. J. Reynolds fixed on Joe Camel, who had first appeared in a French girlie magazine in 1974. Joe was not a ruminative ruminant. He was a party animal — a “smooth character” and “ladies’ camel,” as Reynolds officials explained — designed to lure “young adult smokers” away from Marlboro. Reynolds went national with Joe in the United States in 1988.
At first, the only public controversy surrounding the new Camel ads involved their looks. As drawn, Joe’s snout bore an inescapable resemblance to the male member. It became a big joke, though R. J. Reynolds was not amused. According to Richard Kluger’s magisterial history of the tobacco industry, Ashes to Ashes, RJR executives initially asked their ad agency’s art directors to make Joe “less testicular.” But the creative types resisted; today nine years later, the camel still has a vaguely penile proboscis. And the company shortly made peace with its camel’s nose in any case. Because the “smooth character” campaign worked, big time. By 1990, the brand had finally firmed up its customer base and made inroads into the 18-to- 24-year-old market.
Joe became a star. And he has been the chief bogey-camel of the anti- smoking movement ever since. In late 1991, the Journal of the American Medical Association published studies on tobacco advertising that appeared to contain two sensational pieces of data. More than 90 percent of American 6- year-olds recognized Joe Camel, almost as many as knew Mickey Mouse. And child consciousness of the cartoon smokesperson explained why Camel had recently boosted its share of the underage cigarette market from less than 1 to more than 30 percent.
Both of these statistics, it soon turned out, were entirely bogus. The Mickey Mouse result was derived from interviews with 23 children at a single Atlanta preschool — and couldn’t be replicated on a broader scale. JAMA’s market-share figures were derived from interviews with “kids” as old as 21, who were shown ads for Camel — but no other cigarette label — and then asked which brand they preferred. Roughly contemporaneous surveys by the federal Centers for Disease Control indicated that Camel’s actual share of the 12-to-17-year-old market was probably only about 10 percent.
You can still find the Mickey Mouse thing in major American newspapers, reported as fact. And whatever their specific merits, the implications of the JAMA articles — that cigarette advertising has a Pavlovian, behavior — altering effect on young people, and that Joe Camel, by design, has boosted teenage smoking — remain gospel with R. J. Reynolds’s critics. Reynolds, of course, says its Joe ain’t so: that the Camel ads are not intended to create new smokers, but instead attempt to produce brand- switching exclusively among a small segment of younger adults who already smoke.
What do you expect them to say, comes the instinctive rejoinder? But some claims are plausible even though cigarette companies advance them. No study has ever established that brand advertising increases tobacco consumption overall, or that it lures underage nonsmokers in particular. Young people begin to develop a cigarette habit through a complicated process, the most important factors in which appear to be the examples of parents, older siblings, and best friends. Advertising, most researchers agree, has little to do with it. Children who smoke do not purchase specific brands; they borrow randomly from adults instead. And most of them don’t begin to smoke on a daily basis until they are 19. After which point, they do become susceptible to brand-based advertising and may switch. But only during a brief window of years. Older smokers are fiercely brand-loyal. Or they smoke generic, cut-rate cigarettes whose manufacturers do not advertise at all.
All of these general postulates can be tested in the case of Joe Camel. That ad campaign’s budget rose sharply in its first few years. Government data from the same period indicate that teenage smoking remained level nationwide. After that, Reynolds’s spending on Joe Camel fell four of the next five years. Teenage smoking actually increased in three of those years. And Camel now has less than 4 percent of the 12-to-17-year-old cigarette market, a smaller percentage than before Joe Camel existed.
What’s with the FTC, then? The commission has repeatedly investigated Camel since 1990. It has been unable to produce convincing evidence that Reynolds has deliberately marketed to teenagers. It has been unable to prove that Joe Camel ever caused a single teenager to begin smoking or continue smoking. Indeed, the FTC now argues that it’s not “our burden” to prove any such thing. All that’s required for a lawsuit against Reynolds, according to the commission, is that there be evidence that Joe Camel was once “likely to have caused” more underage smoking — even if that smoking never happened. Reynolds should originally have decided that its “smooth character” was risky to the public health. Having decided otherwise, the FTC believes, the company broke the law.
Well. The Joe Camel ban won’t take effect anytime soon. It is headed for an inevitable First Amendment challenge that will take years to resolve. If it ever does take effect, it probably won’t work. Foreign countries that have banned tobacco ads haven’t managed to reduce teen smoking much. Cigarette companies that can’t advertise are forced to compete among one another on the basis of price alone, which makes their product cheaper in stores — and therefore more accessible to young people.
In the meantime, ironically, R. J. Reynolds will be forced to preserve Joe as its Camel figurehead. The tobacco industry has for months been engaged in high-stakes negotiations with the nation’s state attorneys general and plaintiffs attorneys. In return for a global settlement of current and future anti-smoking litigation, the industry — Reynolds included — some time ago apparently offered to accept an even wider ban on Joe-like pictorial advertising. But now, suddenly, RJR cannot pull Joe from the market, which move would automatically be interpreted as a confession to FTC charges. By attacking the dromedary, the government has kept him alive.
A surer way for the government to reduce teen smoking would be to impose higher federal cigarette taxes. But cigarette taxes are now anathema to the Clinton/Gore administration. They’re controversial, you see — even if they might, in certain circumstances, be a good idea. So instead we get this shabby, ineffective bit of show-boatery from the Federal Trade Commission.
This is liberalism? We liked the old kind better.
David Tell, for the Editors
