![]() ![]() Thanks to the disappearance of cigarette advertising, the Marlboro Man is now a symbol of yesteryear, seeming almost as dated as the cowboys of the Old West themselves. They had top photographers and top cinematographers, and they created this powerful imagery that appealed to something that ran deeper in the American consciousness. Jim Carrier, journalist and author of the Denver Post series “In Search of the Marlboro Man” (and author of an upcoming book by the same title): They eventually found a set of models that were beautiful-looking men. That, of course, fit American society in the 1950s and 1960s, where Westerns were all over television with shows like Gunsmoke and Maverick and American kids were playing cowboys and Indians. So they decided to drop all the other tattoo guys and just go with the cowboy thing. Scott Ellsworth, former historian at the Smithsonian Institution and co-author of the Marlboro Oral History and Documentation Project : Eventually, someone at Leo Burnett noticed that whenever they showed a cowboy, there was a little rise in sales. The ads pretty much stayed the same all the way after that. But in the early 1960s, they switched back to the cowboy and that’s when it really hit home. ![]() Then they migrated to various images of masculinity, including various sports figures, like players for the Green Bay Packers and stuff like that. That’s the very first one - they had a couple of those, and then they had this series of guys with tattoos on their hands to imply they were in the military. But something about the cowboy would resonate and in time, the cowboy would become the sole image used to promote Marlboros.īarry Vacker, professor of media studies and production at Temple University and author of The Marlboro Man as a Twentieth Century David : The original Marlboro man was this guy holding a cigarette, wearing a cowboy hat, and he’s looking not directly at the camera, but just a little bit off. While the Marlboro Man ads would change little in the nearly 50 years they spent in the American landscape, the early years of the campaign didn’t focus exclusively on cowboys, opting for a variety of masculine figures smoking its cigarettes. Its legacy, however, is muddled: Widely regarded as the most successful advertising campaign of all time, the beautiful imagery depicted in the ads is inextricably linked to the product it sold, which killed countless people, including several of the men who would don the iconic moniker of the Marlboro Man. and would still exist overseas for years after its American retirement in 1999. The ad campaign lasted nearly half a century in the U.S. The result would be nothing short of extraordinary, catapulting Marlboros from less than one percent of the cigarette market to the fourth-biggest brand in under a year, eventually becoming the top cigarette brand in the world. To overcome the idea that a filter was for a woman, the Leo Burnett advertising agency decided to attack that stigma head-on, creating a campaign where the manliest of manly dudes would be depicted smoking a Marlboro. Later on, as cigarettes began to be sold with filters - Marlboros included - filtered cigarettes were also seen as feminine, which further caused men to shy away from the brand.īut after faltering for decades as a lady’s smoke - including trying gimmicks like dying the tips of their cigarettes red - in the 1950s, the Philip Morris Company (which owns Marlboro) decided to direct their product toward men. Decades before the rugged Marlboro Man image was born, Marlboros were a cigarette aimed at women, with their ad campaign focused around high-class ladies elegantly smoking, alongside assurances that Marlboros wouldn’t interfere with a woman’s lipstick. That was the original advertising slogan for Marlboro cigarettes when they first hit the market in the 1920s. ![]()
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