Date: Thu, 3 Mar 94 18:37:44 PST
From: RISKS Forum <risks@csl.sri.com>
Subject: RISKS DIGEST 15.62

RISKS-LIST: RISKS-FORUM Digest  Thursday 3 *March* 1994  Volume 15 : Issue 62

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Date: Thu, 3 Mar 1994 09:03:13 -0800
From: Phil Agre <pagre@ucsd.edu>
Subject: Joe Camel's 10,000,000 best friends

The 3/3/94 New York Times includes a long, fascinating article on recent
trends in cigarette advertising, away from mass media like billboards
and magazines and toward database-oriented marketing based on promotions.
The full reference is:

  Allen R. Myerson, Selling cigarettes: Who needs ads?, New York Times,
  3 March 1994, pages C1, C5 (business section).

Here are two paragraphs from the middle of the article:

  ... Philip Morris marketers boast that the Adventure Team promotion and
  a carefully calculated price cut restored Marlboro's share of the $42
  billion cigarette market from 22 percent last March to nearly 27 percent
  in January, widening its lead over all other brands.  Flush with the
  names and addresses of their new customers, they are planning their next
  campaign.

  Over at R. J. Reynolds, Philip Morris' major rival, marketers pride
  themselves on computerized data banks so huge and detailed that they
  can go far beyond merely aiming their discount coupons and Camel Cash
  merchandise offers at the less than one-quarter of Americans who smoke.
  They can choose not just smokers of competing brands, but those who
  smoke brands with price, taste and image most like those of Camels, for
  example.  In fact, Reynolds can select from that last group just those
  smokers who would gladly switch, for a few pennies a pack, or perhaps an
  ashtray or cap.

These trends have the virtue that non-smokers get exposed to less cigarette
advertising, thus lessening the force of claims that such advertising is
recruits new smokers rather than getting existing smokers to switch brands.
On the other hand, mass cigarette advertising (such as glossy booklets urging
folks to "Get More Gear") is not going away; indeed it is an integral part
of the new strategy.  Finally, and most importantly for Risks, the cigarette
companies' increasingly personalized connections to their customers may
inhibit smokers' attempts to end their addictions, since they will now be
exposed to ever-more-customized stimuli encouraging them, if only implicitly,
to continue smoking.  This is only speculation, of course, but it's an
important test case for the social implications of data-intensive one-to-one
marketing, and it should be watched closely.

Phil Agre, UCSD

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End of RISKS-FORUM Digest 15.62
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