Product Placement, Cigarettes

Hollywood has known for a long time about the power of product placements in the movies—the positioning of name-brand products, either for payment or free of charge, to increase sales. In fact, during the 1930s and 1940s, tobacco companies paid movie stars thousands of dollars to endorse their brands. In the 1970s and 1980s, the practice became widespread among Hollywood studios, despite their denials: According to internal documents from the Brown & Williamson company, Sylvester Stallone guaranteed use of their brand of cigarettes in at least five films (including Rambo and Rocky IV) for a total fee of $500,000. The Philip Morris Company reportedly paid $350,000 to place Lark cigarettes in the James Bond movie, License to Kill, and another $42,500 to place Marlboros in Superman II.

Direct payments for product placements of cigarettes supposedly ended in 1989, when the top 13 tobacco firms adopted the following guidelines to avoid federal regulation: “No payment, direct or indirect, shall be made for the placement of our cigarettes or cigarette advertisements in any film produced for viewing by the general public.” The 1998 Master Settlement Agreement reached between tobacco companies and 46 states forbids this practice. Nevertheless, given the prevalence of cigarette smoking in current Hollywood movies, questions remain about whether product placement of cigarettes is occurring, to what extent, and why. In fact, the tobacco industry has been taking advantage of loopholes in the agreement by providing free promotional items to movie studios and to actors and actresses. In the past, the industry was known to have provided free cigarettes for use in adult films like Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Grease, and Die Hard. It also sent monthly mailings of free cigarettes to 1,888 actors and celebrities who smoke.

Smoking in Hollywood movies continues unabated. A content analysis of the top 25 box office hits from 1988 to 1997 found that 85% of the films contained tobacco use, with 28% containing recognizable brands. Actor endorsement of cigarette brands increased from 1% among the films produced between 1988 and 1990, before the voluntary ban on paid product placement by the tobacco industry, to 11% after the ban (1991 to 1997). Some critics assert that smoking in the movies is the single most powerful influence on young people today, accounting for more than half of all new teen smokers. In one study, smoking in the movies tripled the odds that a teen would try smoking, independent of whether his or her parents smoked.

Although smoking advertisements are banned on TV, smoking continues to be advertised via movie trailers. Ten movies in 2002 had a brand presence in the movie and smoking in the trailer. The TV ads for these 10 movies reached 93% of all 12-to-17-year-olds in the country, and 81% of all 12-to-17-year-olds saw at least one of these trailers three or more times.