The MEDIA BUSINESS: ADVERTISING: An anti-tobacco campaign aims not at smoking but the use of animals in tests.
Published: September 27, 2002
The agency, Crispin Porter & Bogusky in Miami, donated its creative services to the advocacy group, fashioning a campaign against experimentation on animals by the tobacco companies. The effort employs the shock tactics favored by the organization, but some infuriated representatives of the tobacco companies predicted the tactics would backfire.
The organization’s volunteers, dressed as giant laboratory rats, have begun handing out stickers spoofing cigarette packaging to schoolchildren as young as 6 years old. The stickers advertise fake brands like Murderboro (parodying the Marlboro brand made by Philip Morris U.S.A.), Krool (for the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company’s Kool brand), and Cadaver and Slay’Em (for R. J. Reynolds Tobacco’s Camel and Salem brands, respectively).
The Slay’Em sticker, for example, portrays a crying rabbit in restraints inhaling cigarette smoke over the legend ”Spilled Blood, Uncool Tests.” The rear of the stickers has photographs of lab animals being forced to breathe cigarette smoke.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, known as PETA, is taking aim at schools in the backyards of several tobacco companies, including R. J. Reynolds High School in Winston-Salem, N.C., before taking the campaign national next month.(…)
The latest efforts of the organization are a continuation of its campaign to halt the use of animals in product tests, not an antismoking push, according to Dan Mathews, vice president for campaigns at PETA. ”If kids stop smoking as a result, we’re delighted, but that’s not the focus,” Mr. Mathews said. ”The focus is to get kids to voice their outrage.”
”If you do smoke, please choose a brand that doesn’t fund animal tests, like American Spirits,” he said, referring to a brand made by the Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Company, in Santa Fe, N.M., a subsidiary of R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Holdings.
(…) The stickers depict monkeys, dogs and rabbits, but all three of the tobacco companies that are cited on the stickers experiment only on rodents, their representatives said. The companies finance research outside their own laboratories that could involve other animals, but their representatives said that all research follows federal ethics guidelines and involves the minimum number of animals.
Moreover, the research of tobacco companies is not as frivolous or redundant as the campaign charges, said Mark Smith, a spokesman for Brown & Williamson in Louisville, part of British American Tobacco. ”As we develop new materials for potentially risk-reduced products, it’s incumbent on us to fully test those materials,” he said.
This extract is from The New York Times.
This article shows that animals are exploited to make tests and these animals died from tests for tobacco. The agency has tried to shock by showing the horror which animals undergo, mainly the new companies of tobacco. Animals are used for tobacco tests, it is very hard to believe. This article demonstrates the importance of the tobacco at the young people and the unbearable practice for the tests. Animals are served as toys and not as animal beings!! It is very grave..
