HISTORY’s Moment in Media: How Tobacco Advertising Changed Forever
America's tobacco companies spend billions of dollars each year to advertise their products. They've done so for generations, from doctor and dentist testimonials in the early and middle parts of the 20th century through icons like the Marlboro Man and Joe Camel in later decades. But after the landmark 1964 Surgeon General's report demonstrated a link between smoking and cancer, the government began placing restrictions on tobacco advertising. The most transformative restriction, the Master Settlement Agreement -- which in many ways put an end to tobacco advertising -- went into effect 24 years ago this month, on November 23, 1998.
The Master Settlement Agreement was a deal made by 46 states and six U.S. territories to settle all claims brought against the four biggest tobacco companies to recover the Medicaid funds spent treating people with diseases caused by smoking. (The remaining four states had previously reached their own settlements with tobacco companies.)
The agreement was structured to drive down smoking rates, especially among young people. To do that, it required cigarette manufacturers to make payments to the states in perpetuity, so long as they continue to sell cigarettes in the United States -- which in turn drives up their cost. It banned the tobacco companies from obscuring tobacco's health risks. And it hugely restricted permissible tobacco advertising, prohibiting the tobacco companies from targeting youth or using cartoons in advertising, banning most outdoor and transit advertising and preventing the distribution of branded merchandise from tobacco companies, among other limits.
No more Marlboro Man billboards. No more Joe Camel.
Of course, the Master Settlement Agreement wasn't the first restriction on tobacco advertising in the United States. Nor would it be the last. In 1967, only three years after the Surgeon General's report, the FCC ruled that the Fairness Doctrine -- a since-abandoned policy requiring broadcasters using the public airwaves to present differing viewpoints on matters of public interest -- applied to cigarette ads. That meant that anti-smoking ads had to be broadcast alongside cigarette ads.
In 1971, Congress required the FCC to go a big step further, eliminating all cigarette advertising. TV ads for smokeless tobacco continued, as did outdoor and print ads for cigarettes. (Cigarette advertising in magazines didn't stop until the early years of the 21st century, and by the advertisers' decision, not by a requirement.)
In 2006, a federal court ruled that the tobacco companies had fraudulently claimed that cigarettes labeled "low tar" and "light" were less unhealthy when the companies knew they were not. The court banned the use of such terms. And in 2009 the FDA gained the right to regulate tobacco products, which expanded some mandates of the Master Settlement Agreement and also banned cigarette vending machines.
But the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement was notable for not only the many kinds of tobacco marketing it put an end to but also the new kind of marketing it produced. One of its provisions created the American Legacy Foundation, later renamed the Truth Initiative. Funded by the states using parts of their proceeds from the settlement, the Truth Initiative is a national public health organization specifically dedicated to ending tobacco use among young people. It has made some of the most striking anti-smoking PSAs you've seen.
In 2015, Ad Age named Truth's signature campaign as one of the top campaigns of the 21st century. Perhaps more important, from 1998 to 2019, cigarette use in the United States dropped by 50 percent ... and regular smoking by high schoolers fell from 36.4 percent in 1997 to 6 percent in 2019.
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