Wholly Smokes (11 page)
The plan was to feature each character in a regular Saturday morning TV show without mentioning the product. Later, once younger children had become “imprinted” upon the character, ready to buy anything it stood for, it would be time to introduce a compendium of tie-in products: toys, clothes, food, and, almost as an afterthought, cigarettes – the tobacco connection – though not on broadcast TV, of course.
Dwight’s confidential internal memo painted a vivid picture:
We will be marketing a full range of irresistible products: tote bags, jeans, lunch boxes, sand pails, crayons, coloring books, comics, t-shirts, sweat-suits, sneakers with lights, pajama bags, in-line skates, radios, just about anything kids ever touch. We’ll be talking to Nintendo and Sega about licensing possible video games.
Try to picture the little boy of next year. He will get up in his Cap’n Savage pajamas, and brush his teeth with his Cap’n Savage toothbrush. He’ll breakfast on Cap’n Savage cereal, put on his Cap’n Savage sneakers, his Cap’n Savage jeans, and his Cap’n Savage sweatshirt. He will carry his Cap’n Savage lunchbox to school, where he will use his Cap’n Savage
crayons and his Cap’n Savage calculator. And maybe out on the playground, he and his friends will light up a Cap’n Savage, the great tastin’ sport cigarette.The little girl of next year will like-wise be surrounded with Snapdragon products, from the moment she gets up in her Snapdragon pajamas, all through the day. Snapdragon dolls, Snapdragon t-shirts, Snapdragon breakfast food, Snapdragon songs, and so on, right up to the moment on the playground when, we hope, she and her friends light up a Snapdragon, the fashion fun cigarette.
Thus we’ll be selling not one product, but a whole family of interlocked products. The Saturday cartoons themselves will earn a modest amount, but really they’ll be half-hour commercials for all our Cap’n Savage and Snapdragon products. We’ll have Cap dolls and Snap dolls, plus their full range of accessories. To this we can add their friends plus
their
accessories. Right now a top-shelf toy manufacturer is working up designs for a full complement of clothes, jewelry, tampons, weapons, and so on. What little girl will be able to resist Snapdragon’s tiny purse, with its cute little pack of Snapdragon cigarettes!
The company was of course aware of one snag: no tobacco product could be mentioned on commercial broadcast or cable TV. The Saturday morning broadcasts (
Cap’n Savage, Scourge of the Caribbean
, and
My Little Snapdragon
) must remain forever free of tobacco advertising.
Oddly enough, there were no such restrictions on school cable TV. Kids at school could watch whatever an advertiser wanted to show them, at least on the Rousseau Channel. This privately funded cable channel, available only in schools, was already a pipeline into little minds for heavy advertising campaigns.
This was possible because the Rousseau Cable Company provided the schools with everything – the TV monitors, the VCRs, the cable, the satellite time – plus hours of free educational programming. In return, Rousseau only asked to be allowed to slip in a few minutes of commercials throughout the school day. So far they’d been selling only fast food, candy bars, sneakers, games, toys, movie promotional tie-ins for movies – all the usual kid stuff. But now GST could use the Rousseau Channel for direct smoking commercials.
The Rousseau Cable Company could of course be counted on to cooperate with GST, because Rousseau was a wholly-owned subsidiary of GST. But would the schools cooperate? As Dwight put it:
Naturally any school can refuse these commercials. If they do so, however, the Rousseau Cable Company will take back its TV monitors and VCRs, rip out its cable, and effectively black out school television.
There will be nothing to keep the kids quiet with
. Once teachers realize that, they’ll play ball.
It was about this time that board members began noticing Dwight Badcock’s increasingly eccentric behavior:
Dwight came into the conference room wearing a patch over one eye and a white bandanna tied over his head, and waving a cutlass.
“I’m Cap’n Savage,” he said. “Scourge of the Caribbean!”
We all applauded. He raised the cut-lass and brought it down – Wham! – chopping a notch in the conference table. We applauded again. The more outrageous he got, the more we loved it.
Up to a point. Dwight turned up the next day in the same regalia, and the day after that. When it went on for a week, we began to get worried.
The Group Two Campaign: Slamdunk and Slapshot
Kids in Group Two, ages ten to fourteen, were not so easily influenced by cartoon characters. No doubt R. J. Reynolds did well enough with their Old Joe the Camel character, just the kind of worthless lout that early teens could identify with, but GST was aiming for something even more effective.
Research showed that members of this cohort related far more strongly to three things: mindless rock music, athletics, and violence. Especially violence. As a memo from the marketing director explained:
We’ve been working with focus groups to develop a product image. Musical references, we felt, are too quickly out of date. We will of course rely on videos with music – gangsta rap especially – but our main thrust should be towards athletics and violence. We suggest two possible product names:
Slamdunk
or
Slapshot
.For a further focus group study, we removed the blackboard from a classroom and replaced it with a two-way mirror. Seatedbehindit, abattery of motivational psychologists were able to study every nuance of the behavior of real kids in a
real classroom.We then showed the kids violent videos featuring both product names. The boys seemed generally to prefer
Slapshot
. In later discussions, they agreed they would like to smoke a cigarette with that name.Girls showed less interest in either name. Indeed, our team found them paying little attention to the screen violence. Instead, they spent the time discussing dates and nail polish, yawning, and even doing schoolwork. Clearly, we need to do a lot of work in this area.
We see ourselves putting together an ad with a dozen violent scenes – hockey, football, karate, etc. We would give prominence to Dennis Rodman kicking a cameraman, Mike Tyson biting the famous ear, and the like. Or how about O.J. Simpson demonstrating a knife? (It’s necessary to tread carefully here – we can’t imply an athletic endorsement.)
Dwight Badcock (as Cap’n Savage) 1996
The Group Three Campaign: Streetlife
The campaign for the hearts and minds of high school kids was relentless. Dwight laid it all out at a board meeting (recorded on video tape):
DWIGHT (wearing Cap’n Savage regalia): High school has to stay our main target. Much more important than the tiny tots.
BOARD MEMBER: I suppose you have qualms about marketing to the tiny tots.
DWIGHT: Naturally. Let’s face it,
they have very little disposable income
. We need to crack the teen
market – the kids with real money.For the teens, we emphasize how cigarettes can make you mysterious and interesting, and even improve your complexion and hair. Our provisional name is
Street-Life
. We’ll package them in a shiny black flip-top box – like black leather – with the name scrawled across it in Dayglo letters, kind of a cross between a spray-painted graffito and a neon sign. With a slogan like NOW YOU SMOKIN’!
BOARD MEMBER: I like the slogan. How do we deliver our message?
DWIGHT: We’ll hit them all day, beginning with the school buses. We’ll put ads all over the sides of buses. Just think of a kid standing waiting for the bus, and here it rolls in, bringing our message up at eye level.
BOARD MEMBER: Is that legal?
DWIGHT: Why not? It worked for 7-Up at Colorado Springs, why not
for us in other towns? And we also want to place more ads
inside
the bus. Like this (holds up a placard):
NO SMOKING
B
UT IF YOU COULD LIGHT UP,
WOULDN’T YOU RATHER TRY
S
TREET
L
IFE
?
BOARD MEMBER: What about kids who don’t ride the bus?
DWIGHT (lifts the eyepatch to rub his eye): They probably smoke already. But don’t worry, we’re saturating the school, too. The idea is to place ads on every surface – the halls, lunchrooms, lockers, wherever kids look. Mirrors for instance: we’re placing mirrors with ads printed across them
inside
every kid’s locker door. What high school kid can pass up a mirror?
BOARD MEMBER: Good thinking.
What about the john? That has mirrors, and they probably do their smoking there, right?
DWIGHT: Yes, the restrooms are special sanctuaries for our ads. The boys’ ads will show some cool, tough dudes smoking. We can use movie posters of James Dean, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum – and we can put speech balloons over their heads saying, “Don’t smoke in here. But if you do, try S
TREET
LIFE
.” Or one in the stalls, saying, “Whatever you’re doing in here, you can do it better with S
TREET
LIFE
.” In the girls’ john, the ad can show some anorexic model, more or less telling them “If I didn’t smoke S
TREET
LIFE
, I’d weigh 400 pounds!”
BOARD MEMBER: Ingenious! I suppose there’ll be lunchroom ads?
DWIGHT: Naturally. There are so many surfaces in a lunchroom. We see huge billboards on the walls, ads embedded in table surfaces
and trays, printedon napkins, and of course paper placemats.
BOARD MEMBER: What about the gym?
DWIGHT: We have to be careful with gyms and sports fields. The problem is, parents come to watch Junior play b-ball and notice the ads. Next thing you know, they’re phoning the school board. In any case, our real coverage will be in the classroom materials. Once you get the teacher to pass out your brochures as textbooks, it just doesn’t get any better. In a sense, the teacher is endorsing the product. The kids are in no position to argue, even if they wanted to. So we’re providing free book jackets, free tests, free charts, free books and videos, free everything. Even better than free. If a school co-operates, they get a little bonus check at the end of the year.
BOARD MEMBER: Amazing.
DWIGHT: We’re of course planning a
full range of teaching materials. That means books, pamphlets, charts, posters, videos, slide presentations.This chart, for use in diversity appreciation courses, emphasizes the Native American contribution to our culture – so many of the products kids appreciate, like potatoes, corn, and
tobacco
. They will be represented here by the brands kids know and love: Heidi-Ho potato chips, Chompitos corn chips, and of course S
TREET
L
IFE
cigarettes.And here’s an excerpt from our pamphlet,
Your Nutrition: