Pod Insights ABC Rewind 04 Where the bloody hell were you! When the tobacco ads came down About this episode It's the early 1970s and the power of good is unleashed. In the Age of Aquarius the public get wise to being hoodwinked by advertising. Health campaigners hijack the medium — and turn it to their advantage.
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0:07 Speaker 01 ABC Rewind.
0:10 Speaker 02 Hi, I'm Dee Madigan. Today, the final episode of Where the Bloody Hell Were You? Advertising with a social conscience arrives in our living rooms at last. Every cigarette is doing you damage.
0:23 Speaker 03 Because I know, he's not talking to me.
0:24 Speaker 04 Put on a few kilos. If I can do it. But I'm not worried. Don't be a wally with water. Crash without a seatbelt.
0:31 Speaker 05 I reckon we all can.
0:35 Speaker 05 Realise your full potential and never give up.
0:41 Speaker 02 In the early days of television advertising, it was pretty well a free for all. Agencies were fiercely competitive for the clients with the biggest budget. And of course, the clients that spent the most money were the tobacco companies.
0:57 Speaker 02 In the 1950s, more than three quarters of Australian men smoked. And the percentage of women who were taking up the habit was rising quickly.
1:04 Speaker 05 A slim cigarette for women only. Tailored with a feather in hand.
1:08 Speaker 02 And advertising played a key role.
1:11 Speaker 00 Good evening and welcome to television. From wherever you are.
1:14 Speaker 06 Television arrives in Australia in 1956. And the first advertisement on TV is for Rothman cigarettes.
1:23 Speaker 02 Robert Crawford, professor of advertising and media history.
1:27 Speaker 06 For consumers, new to television, everything was a novelty. The advertisements, what was being sold, the way they were selling it.
1:34 Speaker 03 With the best tobacco money combined.
1:40 Speaker 03 Country life cigarettes have the taste that's right.
1:42 Speaker 06 Smoke, new tear filter, and you'll smoke easy. They were already from day one on the front foot, using advertising as a tool to sell their product.
1:58 Speaker 04 The tobacco industry particularly was very good at convincing people that it was a smooth, smart thing to do.
2:07 Speaker 06 Advertising is what builds the brand.
2:11 Speaker 03 When only the best will do. And isn't that all the time? Dunhill, the most distinguished tobacco house in the world.
2:26 Speaker 06 They also were one of the first industries to understand the power of imagery. You are selling a cigarette, but you're selling a whole lifestyle that goes with it. A way of seeing and imagining yourself. Forward-looking people look to modern ideas, the auto watch.
2:43 Speaker 02 Forward-looking people look for the latest in modern living.
2:47 Speaker 02 About this time, a new version of the Australian self was emerging. And the new boy at Hertz Walpole, Alan Johnston, was in the right place at the right time. His boss Jim had seen a bloke on the telly that sounded like he just might fit the bill.
3:05 Speaker 03 G'day.
3:06 Speaker 06 I'm Alan Johnston. We'd been briefed by Rothmans to launch a new cigarette.
3:11 Speaker 03 It'd be nice to talk to you, see, and being the swivve, sophisticated man about town. I thought I'd do the job with a bit of, you know, polish, a touch of class.
3:19 Speaker 06 We had a knockabout bloke called Paul Hogan, very knockabout. We had the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, or most of it, backing him. We had him in a dinner suit and that, but he was still very hocka. G'day, you know, it'd be nice to talk to you, see.
3:30 Speaker 03 I'll get the boys back here to set the scene with a bit of the old mood music.
3:33 Speaker 06 It wouldn't have been accepted in most companies. A lot of people were terrified on the day of the shoot. None of the usual executives turned up to the shoot because they thought it was going to be a disaster, frankly. That's the truth.
3:44 Speaker 03 These new Winfields are 40 cents. That's about the price you should be paying for a good smoke.
3:49 Speaker 06 Paul Hogan comes on. He takes the piss out of other tobacco advertisements, speaking in a broad Australian accent, laconic. Australians loved that. So, again, this whole image of Winfield as the bloke's cigarette.
4:05 Speaker 03 Good tobacco. Mild, quality all the way.
4:09 Speaker 06 Sir Ronald Irish was running Rothmans. He was chairman in those days. And he rang up Reg Waston and said, can you get that uncouth person, get him off here? It's rude and uncouth. And Reg said, but we're selling a million sticks a day, which is how they used to talk. Well, all right, can you get him to pronounce things a little bit clearly?
4:34 Speaker 04 Marlborough in Australia had the biggest market share in the world. And after Hogan and Winfield, it simply collapsed.
4:43 Speaker 05 Anyhow. And there had been nothing like that in cigarettes at all.
4:49 Speaker 04 Interestingly, Paul Hogan later would rue his involvement in that campaign. It was so powerful that his resonance with kids meant that kids were taking up smoking. And that's one of the things that started to turn against that campaign. Such was its success.
5:09 Speaker 02 Although the late 1960s brought confirmation that tobacco was a major cause of death and disease, female smoking rates continued to rise, reaching one-third by the early 1970s. And male smoking rates were still much higher.
5:26 Speaker 04 There was increasing pressure on the government to act. Doing nothing was becoming more and more difficult. To counter the power of advertising by the large tobacco firms, the governments would also need to engage in that very medium that had built up tobacco to sort of deconstruct it.
5:46 Speaker 02 So the government decided to dip into the kitty. The huge influx of dollars from tobacco tax rises kicked off health promotion. The newly-elected Whitlam government then pledged half a million dollars and put Bernie McKay in charge of a trial anti-smoking campaign. His test area was to be Lismore, on the New South Wales north coast.
6:11 Speaker 03 The smell of the alternative cigarette sweetens the main street air. This hippie movement, as you call it, we call it the Aquarius movement.
6:19 Speaker 05 At that stage, the Aquarius Festival had just finished in Nimbun, or in the early 70s, 72. And there were a whole lot of people that went to the Aquarius Festival and decided they'd like to have an alternative lifestyle on the north coast. That's where I was able to recruit some very good people. Basically use anti-smoking advertising to try and convince the population to change. One in particular was John Beavens.
6:50 Speaker 03 I'm John Beavens. I got into advertising straight out of school in 1963 B.C. The B.C. stands for Bryce Courtney, who was the young creative director at the time. He seemed old to me. I think he was probably about 26. We were approached by the New South Wales Department of Health, Brian Slapp and myself. And it was almost like a guerrilla tactic, but to make some anti-smoking ads. There was a kind of a sense of subversion.
7:20 Speaker 05 We sat down and actually looked at putting ads together to run on television to produce, hopefully, a community backlash against smoking.
7:33 Speaker 03 The idea was that if this campaign was successful, it would be rolled out into New South Wales. I remember going and speaking to a guy called Dr Gary Egger and just saying, "Well, can you explain, you know, what's the issue with cigarettes? Why are they bad?" And he said, "The lung, your lung is like a sponge and it soaks up smoke." When we heard this fact that Gary Egger had given us, the commercial pretty well wrote itself. The human lung is like a sponge. A sponge designed to soak up air. You know, Brian was a fantastic art director and he designed the cut-out figure of a man with a household sponge stuck on his chest.
8:18 Speaker 03 And we just shot that commercial. We had the voiceover say, "The human lung is like a sponge, a sponge designed to soak up air." But some people use it to soak up smoke. But some people use it to soak up smoke. If the average smoker... Could wring out what goes into his lungs.
8:38 Speaker 06 The tobacco companies claimed that it wasn't correct. That that wouldn't have been the amount of tar that came into a beaker and so on.
8:47 Speaker 03 And so we just simply rewrite the script slightly and said,
8:54 Speaker 03 could collect and wring out what goes in his lungs over a year. He'd find this much cancer-producing tar.
9:03 Speaker 06 And we got it back on, but it was off for about, I don't know, four weeks or something like that. Cigarette by cigarette, these air sacs die until you're out of breath. But some people use their lungs to soak up cigarette smoke. Fortunately, some quit smoking before they quit breathing.
9:20 Speaker 03 They never told me when I started. I was signing up for life. It took me 15 years to realise. Then it cut me like a knife.
9:31 Speaker 02 Many agencies were financially reliant on these powerful clients, and the clients relied on the power of advertising. The anti-smoking lobby was emerging as a thorn in both their sides, and its power was growing.
9:48 Speaker 02 The effectiveness of the anti-smoking campaign gave the government confidence and further galvanized public sentiment. Arthur Chesterfield Evans is a veteran of the movement. Once the government put health ads on television, they were effectively saying, yes, those other ads shouldn't have been there. Here's the truth and we all, this is the norm now. The norm is this stuff's really bad and it should stop. And we got some pretty impressive drops in smoking rates. Give up now.
10:18 Speaker 02 Haven't you coughed up enough?
10:24 Speaker 02 The Lismore area had the greatest decrease, with a 16% drop within a short time of the advertisement airing. Tobacco ads were officially taken off television in 1976, but they continued outdoors, and no one could ignore those pervasive billboards.
10:42 Speaker 04 You could still drive along in the street and you'd see the ads for Winfield or the ad for Rothmans, et cetera.
10:49 Speaker 06 Three graffitists met at a billboard.
10:56 Speaker 02 Formal complaints were listed, logged and seemingly forgotten. So in 1979, a group calling themselves Bugger Up armed themselves with spray cans and took matters into their own hands. Arthur Chesterfield Evans joined them.
11:13 Speaker 04 Bugger Up stood for billboard utilizing graffiti against unhealthy promotions.
11:21 Speaker 04 This guerrilla campaign was the only option that was available to these people, actually pointing out what this ad is doing.
11:29 Speaker 03 Yeah, well, this is a really good little device that we've worked out. See, if the billboards are only fairly low, we use the can normally. But if it's a high billboard, we can extend up to there or even further.
11:43 Speaker 00 I'm Dr Arthur Chesterfield Evans. I'd seen Bugger Up's work around the place because they were pretty ubiquitous. I saw a lot of tobacco-caused disease and that got me very upset about tobacco. And so I joined Bugger Up in order to do something about that. I was working in cardiothoracic surgery at the time at North Shore Hospital and I was the registrar. And one day a guy came in, he was a very nice chap and he smoked pincerned hedges and he'd had this massive heart attack. And his heart was so bad that as one half of his heart contracted, the other calf sort of bloomed out so that it was sort of, it wasn't pumping, nothing was coming out because as one half contracted, the other bloomed out. And I looked at his scan, I said, gee, that's a bad heart.
12:25 Speaker 00 And he was only 52, he was a businessman, very intelligent, had a lovely wife and two lovely daughters. Anyway, we went and operated on him. After the operation, we had a lot of trouble getting him off the support pump, you know, like he was, his heart just would not do the job. And he was in intensive care and after the operation, of course, I was the registrar. So I was looking after the intensive care unit. And, you know, the boss had gone home to bed. And about three o'clock in the morning, his heart stopped. And so I started pumping away and rang the boss and said, what am I going to do? He said, oh, he said, pump him with your hands, you know. So I opened his chest with the wire cutters and put my hand in it, was pumping away with his heart in my hands.
13:12 Speaker 00 The boss said, you know. Pump until I get there. So he came in at about about three in the morning. And he took over and he was pumping away for a while. And he said, tell me what happened, Arthur. And I described all the arrhythmias and the blood pressure fall and so on. And he said, oh, you've done everything right. You followed the protocol. No point in this, is it? So he pulled the sheet over and said, you go and talk to the relatives. So there we so.
13:42 Speaker 00 I went outside and the
13:47 Speaker 00 the corridor was only half lit because they turned the lights down at night. And the his wife was there. She was quite a nice looking woman. And he had two daughters, I suppose, about fourteen and twelve.
14:02 Speaker 00 And the tears were streaming
14:06 Speaker 00 down their faces. And they said, why does this happen, doctor? And I said,
14:17 Speaker 00 it's just one of those things. And that wasn't a good answer. But I thought to myself,
14:25 Speaker 00 it wasn't one of those things that was bent and he just killed that man. And anyway, I went back to bed, you know, about five o'clock in the morning. I had a couple of hours sleep and then we had to start again, of course, at seven o'clock the next morning. And that that day I worked the next day as well as one does. And I was exhausted because I'd been up, you know, all night. And my girlfriend at the time said, I said, look, I just want to go to bed. And she said, oh, you always got to go to bed. You never, you never go out. We never go out. I said, okay, okay, we'll go to the movies. So anyway, I, we went off to the movies in George Street. And we sort of walked through all the kids smoking outside the movie. And we got into the movie and the mildred man wrote on the screen.
15:12 Speaker 00 And because she could sit in my sitting room advertising. And I said, I'm going to stop this if it's the last thing I do.
15:25 Speaker 00 Baggerup were being far more successful than the people writing letters. So from my point of view, the question was, was I going to join Baggerup? Or was I going to stay with the people who stayed legal? And I thought, well, the question here is, you know, it's obvious what needs to be done and it's obvious who's doing the right thing and it's obvious who's the most effective. So the question for me was, well, are you a wimp or not? My question, you look at your conscious, look in the mirror and say, are you a wimp, Arthur? Say, no, I don't want to be a wimp, I'll go and do a billboard. So that's what got me going, really.
16:03 Speaker 05 And stepped back and it looked terrific. There was come to poison country and I just thought, that's it, I've started something right now.
16:18 Speaker 05 Australia was leading the world in social marketing. They really switched on very, very progressive.
16:30 Speaker 02 The effectiveness of the anti-smoking ads showed that the medium need not be restricted to issues of consumption. Philip Adams and his agency, MDA, were one of the first to embrace community service advertising, or as we call it now, social marketing.
16:51 Speaker 04 I being an ex-communist, having simultaneously been employed in the engine room of capitalism, always sort of bit off about it. So what I used to do was seek to expiate guilt by doing mildly worthy advertising campaigns. So I used to do an awful lot of pro bono work for the Anti-Cancer Council.
17:14 Speaker 04 Advertising agencies often, and still today, do this pro bono work. And it does two things. On the one hand, it enables them to give back to the community. But on another hand, it gives them the freedom to be quite creative with their work. Controversial cull of hundreds of kangaroos.
17:31 Speaker 05 Bring kangaroo numbers down to sustainable.
17:35 Speaker 04 Well, you had a campaign to stop the culling of kangaroos, the social campaign. But it was also a campaign that was used to advertise the advertising agency, which was in fact Philip Adams' agency. And Philip Adams would go on to become well-known for his social advertising, particularly during the 70s and 80s.
18:14 Speaker 06 And a young Minister for Sport in the Victorian Liberal Government came to see me. He was desperate to get people to do exercise. And he'd been asking a few people to do a lot. He expected a handful at least of Victorians, Melburnians, to go on marathons. And I said, "No, this is not the right way to do it. We've got to ask a lot of people to do a little." So we flipped the whole thing over upside down. And I came up with the idea of a campaign that was used chirpy animation, funny, engaging, likeable, to make gentle suggestions to people on simple exercises like tossing a frisbee or taking the dog for a walk.
18:58 Speaker 03 Why, it's the In It, Mo, Rick, and you've got to have a balanced diet. Well, my diet's balanced. The six tinnies on this side, balance the five cakes and the three dogs on this side. Oh, I feel crook.
19:10 Speaker 06 I went to my dear friend Alex Stitt, who died recently. And Al was probably Australia's greatest professional designer and animator. And Al and I cooked up Life Be In It.
19:32 Speaker 04 I'm walking.
19:38 Speaker 04 There are fewer restrictions. The client is so happy to have an agency coming on board and doing a professional job for them that they give them that creative licence. So agencies are able to use this to advertise themselves.
19:52 Speaker 03 Have you copped this bloke on the telly? Interrupting me favourite show with a tini arranged on his belly. Reminds me of someone I know. Not that I'm against physical fitness, don't get me wrong on that score. I could watch all them fit blokes forever. But me thumbs inclined to get sore.
20:09 Speaker 05 Anything that seemed to me to be less immoral or amoral than flogging detergent. And so, you know, I became the sort of the king of social engineering. Life be in it, I think, fires the starting gun for this era. And nothing was ever the same again.
20:27 Speaker 03 So when this bloke says, "Life be in it", be in it, he says on TV. I give him a nod, change channels. Because I know he's not talking to me.
20:45 Speaker 02 Australia's love of a tini in front of the telly wasn't curbed by the need to drive. Road accidents involving alcohol were climbing steadily. According to John Beavens, by the 1980s, the stats were horrific. He was called in again. But this time, he ignored the advertising brief he was given.
21:05 Speaker 06 In 1982, I got a call and was invited to go to a meeting with Peter Cox, who was a minister for transport. And he gave me the best brief that I've ever been given in advertising. It was nine words. He simply said, "I want to get the blood off the roads." And he was a politician who sincerely wanted to do something about drink driving. Because back in 1982, I mean, we all did it. I would have a few beers, get into the car and drive home. It was illegal, but it was, there was no risk. That you'd get caught.
21:49 Speaker 06 If you had an accident and it was shown that you'd been driving under the influence, then you could be charged with DUI. But there was no deterrence in place. Random breath testing was due to be introduced in December in 1982, just prior to Christmas. The RTA, the Road and Traffic Authority. Their brief was that we need to explain the process and the procedure of random breath testing. So it was to be an information campaign. And it didn't seem right. This was not about giving people information. It was about stopping them from drinking and driving.
22:34 Speaker 06 So I asked if I could perhaps go out with the Highway Patrol to kind of get a sense for what was happening. So I went out with two Highway Patrol officers and they set up a speed trap on Flat Rock Drive at Camaray to let me see what would happen when they caught somebody who'd been drink driving. Random breath testing had not been introduced, so they couldn't pull people over and randomly breath test them. They had to wait until somebody had been, you know, some other kind of traffic infringement. So speeding was a perfect way to catch people. And then if they suspected that the person had been drinking, they'd get them to blow
23:19 Speaker 06 in the bag.
23:24 Speaker 06 We'd be sitting in the patrol car and the officer would say, look, that guy in the car in front has been drinking. I said, how do you know? And he said, because see the way he's just sort of clipping the lane as he goes around a corner. So they would pull him over and, you know, get the person out of the car. And the person was, you know, you could tell he was seriously affected by alcohol. What I observed was the fear that people had when they were pulled over for drink driving and the humiliation that they suffered. One guy that we caught was sitting in the back of the Car being taken to the police station because once if they blew into the bag back
24:07 Speaker 06 in those days and they failed the breath test there, they had to be taken back to the police station and given a breathalyzer so that they could prove that they were over the limit. And this guy was sitting in the back of the police car, uh, next to me actually, I was sitting in the back there too. And he was saying, "You, you can't arrest me," he said, "I'm, I've got friends in high places." So I could see the, the humiliation of, of being arrested and to think that you could be arrested for having a few beers. People just couldn't comprehend and the way that they would try and talk themselves out of it was a really great insight.
24:47 Speaker 06 So out of that night came simply the phrase, "How will you go when you sit for the test? Will you be under O5 or under arrest?" Please accept our apology for the... Advertising often writes itself. If you get out there and just watch what's going on, the ads will write themselves. But there's just no alternative if we're gonna let thousands more live. That campaign ran with a jingle because it was still in the days of the jingle and I was hugely influenced by Mojo. I mean, I just, I was such a great admirer of those guys. How will you go when you sit for the test? How will you go when you sit for the test?
25:31 Speaker 06 Will you be under O5 or under arrest? How will you go when you sit for the test? Will you be under... The advertising campaign, it was a big lie. It kind of told the truth, but it twisted the truth because it said, "How will you go when you sit for the test? Will you be under O5 or under arrest?" It didn't say if you sit for the test. So it created this sense of everybody was going to be tested and, and I believed that. And the night that random breath testing was launched, people had the choice, "Do I give up driving or do I give up drinking?" It was coming up to Christmas.
26:11 Speaker 06 Most people chose to go out and have a few beers. The role of the advertising was to amplify the deterrence. The news the day after random breath testing was launched was the front page news that people just couldn't... Get home, the trains were packed, there was chaos at Circular Quay, people couldn't get ferries. Nobody, you know, realised that behaviour would literally be changed overnight, and it was.
26:47 Speaker 02 The success of the social marketing campaigns of the 1970s and 80s showed that advertising had become an indispensable tool for non-commercial groups to get their message to the masses.
27:00 Speaker 06 I think you're working with people who really had the guts to, to make change.
27:05 Speaker 05 I wonder what's this red button do?
27:11 Speaker 05 It could kill more Australians than World War II.
27:14 Speaker 02 It's enough to make you sick, very sick.
27:21 Speaker 02 Social marketing has subsequently become more targeted in its approach. Scientists call it a micro-slick.
27:28 Speaker 05 Speed, you don't know what it'll do to you.
27:30 Speaker 02 Safety switches cut the power fast enough to save lives. Yet its promise of living a better life remains the same. And ironically, this is the very same message that commercial advertisers have been selling us all along.
27:57 Speaker 02 And that was the final episode in our series, Where the Bloody Hell Were You?
28:04 Speaker 02 If you missed the others, don't despair, you can find them at the RN homepage. The sound engineer was Russell Stapleton, content advisor was Robert Crawford, and Where the Bloody Hell Were You was produced by Roz Blewett. I'm Dee Madigan, and thank you for your company.
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