Some More Commentary on Cigarette Advertising...

     After reading both Maeli and Ruchi's blogs about cigarette advertising I decided I wanted to blog about the same thing since I find this topic to be rather interesting. So I guess I'll just elaborate/restate my comments that I wrote on their blogs.
     Yesterday afternoon I talked to my mom about this and she said that when she was growing up, she saw commercials on t.v. all the time for cigarettes. Now, televised commercials for cigarettes are banned. (Here is a little history of cigarette advertising throughout the years). But print ads and billboards are still allowed, of course; it's the tobacco industry after all. But it's interesting to note where you see the ads. You're not going to find Camel ads in Seventeen magazine or Tiger Beat. Now that would be corrupting little kids' minds. But you'll definitely see them in Sports Illustrated, Cosmopolitan, and Rolling Stone magazine. This website actually lists the magazines that cigarette ads are published in and a little description of the ad as well. You can really tell the targert audience for the ads just by the magazine that the ad was published in. For example, from the website linked above, I saw that a cigarette ad was published in Cosmopolitan and the description of the ad was "winter mocha mint- warm toffee." Just taking a guess, I think women are more likely to buy cigarettes that are describes as "winter mocha mint" than men, and that's probably why it was published in Cosmopolitan.
     Like Ruchi talked about in her blog, I think cigarette sales have a lot to do with their packaging. As I saw in France, there is a brand of cigarettes called "Pink Elephants" and the cigarettes are entirely pink. I don't know how many men are going to buy pink cigarettes, so you can really tell what kind of people this brand is targeting. As Ruchi also mentioned in her blog, Camel was targeting women in their ads, as well, with cigarettes being described as "light and luscious." It's interesting to see how cigarette ads tremendously vary by gender.
     So as I walking to my car yesterday afternoon I was trying to think of something to blog about, and being really desperate I looked at the ground to see what kinds of things people litered on the sidewalk near the school. And it actually turned out to be very interesting. This is what I saw: cigarette butts, empty cigarette boxes, and a Ghiradelli chocolate wrapper. Cigs and desginer chocolate. That's the North Shore for ya I thought. Any thoughts?