The company that makes Lucky Strike cigarettes recently launched the first American Web site created by a major tobacco company. But in a surreptitious marketing twist, the Circuit Breaker site makes no mention of Lucky Strike cigarettes at all. Instead, it purports to be merely a guide for San Francisco clubbers, AdAge.com reported.
"This is the tip of the iceberg; it's the beginning of tobacco companies moving into marketing on the Web," says Jeff Chester, executive director of the watchdog group Center for Media Education. "But instead of being honest about it, it's being done in a very backhand way."
This winter, Brown & Williamson rolled out a massive ad campaign for its Lucky Strike brand in a San Francisco test market, as part of an attempt to reach a hip, young demographic for its new filtered cigarettes. Besides plastering billboards with images of leather-clad urbanites, the company began running a weekly two-page club "guide" called Circuit Breaker in The San Francisco Bay Guardian alternative newspaper, promoting special music events and clubs that sell Lucky Strikes. That weekly guide was launched in a longer form on the Web (a company spokesperson could not say when it launched).
Instead of referring to Brown & Williamson, the creator of the brand-free site is listed as Flair Communications, which is Brown & Williamson's promotional firm. The only reference to tobacco is on a form that readers fill out in order to win a free Circuit Breaker T-shirt, which asks participants whether they smoke, and then states in fine print, "I understand by filling out the information on this form I will be placed on a tobacco company's mailing list."
The FDA has yet to put forth any regulations about tobacco advertising online. Wary of angering the FDA, big tobacco companies so far have steered clear of online marketing targeting US consumers. Both Camel and Lucky Strike have launched German promotional sites.
"Because of a lot of the sensitivity around youth issues, member companies have been aware of that sensitivity and have refrained from aggressive use of the Internet for those purposes," says Thomas Lauria, a spokesman for the Tobacco Institute, the industry trade association.
The Circuit Breaker site seems to be the first attempt to work around that unstated policy. Brown & Williamson spokesman Tom Fitzgerald claims, however, that the site has nothing to do with marketing cigarettes. States Fitzgerald: "The Web site is intended as an information resource, it's not intended to advertise the Lucky Strike brand. Its purpose is to encourage people to attend the Circuit Breaker events promoted in the Web site." But those events, of course, will be bars and clubs where there is "a strong Lucky Strike presence."
Brown & Williamson's club-guide marketing ploy is not operating in a vacuum. Several tobacco companies have launched similar guides in alternative weeklies and glossies such as Details, as part of a new marketing approach to reach an urban audience. Camel produces a bar guide similar to the Circuit Breaker called the "Camel Page" for the Bay Guardian's main competition, the San Francisco Weekly, and Marlboro produces its own men's magazine, Unlimited. So far, however, those efforts haven't reached the Web.
