Capps leads movement to get women's magazines to stop accepting tobacco ads

By Associated Press (June 7, 2007)
http://www.sanluisobispo.com/breakingnews/story/61306.html

Dozens of members of Congress are urging women’s magazines like Cosmopolitan, Vogue and Glamour to stop accepting tobacco ads, saying such ads threaten the health of the teenagers and young women who form a large part of their readership.

In a letter sent Tuesday to 11 publications, the 41 lawmakers, led by Rep. Lois Capps, D-Calif., said it was ironic that tobacco ads appear in the same pages as articles on women’s health.

The Congress members said they were particularly concerned by ads for Camel No. 9, the smartly packaged new cigarette by R.J. Reynolds which has been heavily marketed to women.

“To our great concern, R.J. Reynolds is heavily relying on leading women’s magazines, including yours, to aggressively market this deadly product to young women, including teenagers,” they wrote. The letter was released to the media on Wednesday.

R.J. Reynolds says its product, which comes in a sleek black box with a border of teal or fuschia and is advertised on heavy, shiny paper adorned with images of roses, is aimed solely at established adult smokers. Anti-smoking groups allege the product is designed to lure young women to take up smoking.

“With over a thousand of their customers dying every day from tobacco-related disease, cigarette companies certainly knew their demographic when they referred to teens as ’replacement smokers’ in their internal documents,” the congressional letter said.

Capps, a member of the Health Subcommitte, added in a statement that “as a nurse, a mother and a grandmother, I am very concerned about popular women’s magazines accepting the advertising dollars of cigarette manufacturers and turning a blind eye towards the deadly effect these cigarettes have on women.”

There was no immediate response to the letter from any of the magazines.

Conde Nast, which publishes four of the 11 magazines mentioned in the letter — Vogue, Glamour, Lucky and W — says it’s up to the individual titles whether or not to accept tobacco ads.

Other magazines mentioned in the letter were Cosmopolitan, Elle, Marie Claire, US Weekly, InStyle, Interview Magazine, and Soap Opera Digest. Print ads for tobacco are banned in a number of countries, including throughout Europe, but legal in the United States. Tobacco advertising was banned from radio and TV long ago, and more recently from billboards.

A major tobacco report issued earlier this month by the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, recommended that print ads be restricted to black and white text only — no images.

This isn’t the first time that Camel No. 9 has aroused congressional concern. Recently five U.S. senators wrote the Federal Trade Commission, complaining that the ad campaign targeted young women.

A number of magazines refuse to accept tobacco ads; just a few are Self, Men’s Health and Money, according to the Tobacco-Free Periodicals Project.

 


 





















Fashion mags draw protests by printing tobacco ads
By Jocelyn Noveck the associated press  Published: 05.31.2007
(Images below added by media educator Frank Baker)

Vogue Magazine Glamour Magazine

Harper's Bazaar Magazine

Lucky
 
NEW YORK — Not long ago, fax machines and e-mail inboxes at Vogue, the world's premier fashion magazine, were briefly assaulted with thousands of angry letters. Not about the latest gorgeously photographed fashion trends or beauty products in its influential pages, but about a single, colorful ad: for Camel No. 9 cigarettes.
"If you draw income from the advertisement of tobacco," Heidi Thompson of Freeport, Ill., wrote in one letter, "you are as guilty as big tobacco companies in selling the health and future of so many of our youth in order to pad your bank accounts."
The letters were part of a grass roots campaign by an anti-smoking group to get Vogue to drop ads for the new, prettily packaged Camels, which they and others feel are targeted to younger women and teenagers.
But it isn't just Vogue. Pick up nearly any fashion magazine this month — Glamour, Harper's Bazaar, Lucky — and you'll see a colorful cigarette ad mixed in with articles on beauty, fitness, nutrition and glowing skin.
You won't find them in a number of other countries. A European Union law, for example, bans tobacco print ads on grounds they glamorize smoking and promote it among young people.
But in the United States, where TV and radio ads were banned long ago and billboards more recently, print ads are the final frontier in tobacco advertising, aside from store displays and the like.
And to anti-smoking groups, their presence, though waning, is especially tasteless in fashion magazines and others aimed at young women — at a time when lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths in women.
"Research out there shows that young people are susceptible to advertising," says Ellen Vargyas, counsel for the American Legacy Foundation, established in the wake of the 1998 settlement between the states and the tobacco industry. "I wish the publications themselves would look hard at what they're doing. Readers look to them to see what's cool, and what's trendy — and they see cigarettes."
Her organization sponsored a major tobacco report issued last week by the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences. The report, which called on Congress and the president to give the Food and Drug Administration power to regulate tobacco, also had a recommendation for print ads: that they be restricted to black and white text only — no images.
That would certainly thwart the impact of the Camel No. 9 campaign, whose ads use shiny paper, sophisticated colors like teal and fuschia, and accents of lace to achieve a sense of feminine chic. Those ads have provoked accusations, including from a group of U.S. senators, that R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., maker of Camels, is trying to lure teens and younger women to smoke. (The company says it seeks only to sway established adult smokers.)
The Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids says volunteers around the country sent Vogue more than 8,000 protest e-mails or faxes earlier this month.
"Vogue does carry tobacco advertising. Beyond that we have no further comment," said Maurie Perl, a spokeswoman for Conde Nast Publications, which publishes Vogue. She also said no one at Vogue, Glamour, Lucky or W, also Conde Nast publications, would be available. Editors at Essence magazine, which also carries tobacco ads and is owned by Time Inc., also declined comment.
Matthew Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, says that while print ads are on the decline, he's still concerned about fashion magazines, and especially the iconic Vogue, because "they have far more impact on teenage girls than almost any other written media."
Magazine analyst Samir Husni says it's "oddly hypocritical" for magazines to run articles about health issues, including cancer, and then have tobacco ads nearby. "What they're saying is that they value their ad customers more than their million or 2 million readers," says Husni, of the University of Mississippi. "Country after country is banning cigarette ads in magazines."
Tobacco companies spent $13.1 billion on promotional spending in 2005, the last year for which there were figures, according to a recent report by the Federal Trade Commission. Most of that went into price discounts for consumers. On magazine ads, they spent $17.2 million in the first quarter of 2007, according to the Magazine Publishers of America.
A number of magazines refuse to accept tobacco ads, among them Men's Health, Self, and Money, according to a list provided by the Tobacco-Free Periodicals Project.
But most fashion magazines do.