Newport Pleasure??

One day while flipping through my Entertainment Weekly, I came across this ad. I have to admit that initially my eyes were taken to the tan guy with nicely toned biceps. I stopped continuously flipping through the pages of the magazine to look more closely at the ad. “What the hell are they even advertising?” I thought to myself as my eyes scanned across the page. Then toward the bottom I spotted 3 pictured cartons of Newport Pleasure cigarettes. I was so confused. These two people in the picture have absolutely nothing to do with smoking cigarettes. I glanced back at the picture to see if maybe one of them had a cigarette in their hand and I had missed it. Nope, there was nothing. So why were they using this picture to advertise cigarettes? Because it’s pure genius.

If you take a guy that is tan, well built, with a nice smile and put him with a girl of equal attributes in a sporty setting, you can sell anything; even a product that is proven to cause lung cancer and is a result of over 100,000 deaths each year.  They have used bright colors around the border with a large picture of pretty people to try to mask the surgeon general warning to the left with side-effects such as lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema, and pregnancy complications. This ad makes smoking seem “pleasurable” by the attractiveness and activeness of the couple. It falsely shows that smoking cigarettes will make a person look like the models shown and be with someone as equally attractive and healthy.

 

Unfortunately this how things have to be sold nowadays to get people attention. We are a society that is only concerned with appearances and how we can make ourselves look more attractive to the opposite sex. No disrespect to any of those people because obviously it worked on me too. The only reason I didn't skim over the ad was because I saw an attractive guy in a picture. My dad however smoked most of my childhood and I saw how sick it made him until he finally quit when he was 48. About four years later my best friends dad was taken due to lung cancer. He was only 41 but had been smoking since he was in high school. He had two kids, ages 13 and 10, and a wife that were left behind. Because I have a history with smokers and what it can do to them, ads like this have not influenced me, but what about those that don't have a story to tell? So Newport Pleasure, how truly pleasurable is your product?