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Billboards on Pa. roads ask the young to butt out 

A reporter can wait a whole career and not get to use those words in a family newspaper.

But they're up on billboards all over Pennsylvania, part of the state's antismoking campaign aimed at children from age 9 to 14.

And the butts, of course, are cigarette butts. . . Steve Neiman, the president of Neiman Group, the Harrisburg advertising agency that created the campaign, said he would not expect teenagers to stop smoking because of one billboard.

But, he said, focus groups proved to him that the advertisements, even if the words and images offended adults, would get the attention of the target audience.

"The attention-getting and intriguing way the ads get this message across should give parents and kids an opportunity to start talking to each other about smoking and other health hazards," Pennsylvania's physician general, Robert S. Muscalus, said in a statement announcing the campaign.

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Ads aim to keep youths from smoking 

Teen-agers chuckled as they biked past a sign on the Tilghman Street Bridge in Allentown. The simple ad featured yellow teeth biting down on a lighted cigarette butt and the words ''Butt Munch'' scrawled in black, graffiti-like letters. ''It's funny. It gives you that look like smoking makes your teeth all messed up, like smoking is bad,'' said Matt Schlegel, 14, of Allentown.

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Butts out, teen-agers / Pa. uses billboards to launch anti-smoking campaign 

At the union of West King and West Orange streets, a billboard shows a smoker gripping a cigarette butt in yellowed teeth next to the words "Butt munch."

Over on Manheim Pike, just west of the intersection with Fruitville Pike, another sign shows a teen-age boy who has a mushed cigarette butt for a head next to the phrase "Butt head."

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High school senior creates winning billboard design 

Eric Hancock says one classroom session was all it took to come up with a design that soon will appear on anti-smoking billboard ads in Wisconsin.

A teacher had approached him about the billboard-design contest to replace the tobacco signs that must come down . . . Along the top of a picture of a cigarette, it reads, " Smoking your life away?"

Below that, a cigarette is divided into parts that represent a person' s life, Hancock said. The last line at the butt of the cigarette is the end of life, he said.

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New Moves Into Great Outdoors 

 Billboard operators have managed to keep revenue growing by igniting interest in new categories of advertisers who, for the most part, had never before used billboards. Just 10 years ago, tobacco companies, which in April agreed to drop outdoor advertising, accounted for nearly a third of overall billboard revenue.

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ANTI-SMOKING MESSAGE Billboard / Marlboro men ride into history 

"Bob, I've got emphysema," one cowboy says to the other.

The new billboard is part of the settlement between state attorneys general, including Montana's Joe Mazurek, and major tobacco companies, said Chris Deveny, manager of the tobacco prevention and control program of the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services.

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Anti-smoking billboards replace tobacco signs 

Billboards popping up around the state closely resemble the Marlboro man and a cowboy companion. But look closer.

One of the cowboys is saying to the other: "I miss my lung, Bob."

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If Billboards Make It Here, They'll Make It Anywhere 

The anti-smoking message on a boulevard that has long been a destination for sinners and sybarites (think John Belushi; think Hugh Grant and Divine Brown) is the latest in a tradition of eye-opening billboards in Los Angeles.

The city is ground zero for drive-by messages, and the art of attracting motorists' attention with sharp humor or shock value is more lustily pursued here than anywhere else. . . Rental rates for billboards, which the industry feared would drop after the loss of tobacco clients, are rising because of new demand, said Allen Rossi, operations manager of Outdoor Systems Advertising, which owns the old Marlboro Man billboard.

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Advertising: Infinity Is Set to Acquire Outdoor Systems 

Tobacco was once the largest spender in outdoor advertising, but those ads disappeared for good last month under terms of an agreement between the cigarette makers and state attorneys general. That negative is being turned into a positive, Gottesman said, as outdoor companies cultivate other revenue sources.

"The tobacco companies were long-term clients probably paying unbelievably low rates" for their ad space, he added. "Now other advertisers can come in and pay market rates. It's like when a rent-controlled apartment turns over." [This graph only]

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Outdoor tobacco ads snuffed 

With two members absent, the Spokane Regional Health District on Thursday voted unanimously for a countywide ban on nearly all outdoor advertising for tobacco products, starting in 90 days.

Stores that want to advertise Camel, Skoal, Copenhagen, Marlboro and other brands of tobacco products will be limited to black-and-white signs that list only the brand and the price. At stores within 1,000 feet of schools, parks or playgrounds, even those bland ``tombstone'' ads are prohibited.

The regulations, intended to curb youth smoking, are nearly identical to those passed in recent years in King, Snohomish and Pierce counties.

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Spokane health officials ban most outdoor tobacco ads 

The Spokane Regional Health District on Thursday became the fifth health district in the state to ban most types of outdoor tobacco advertising.

The district's board, which began considering tighter regulations in November 1997, adopted a ban on a 7-0 vote.

Similar rules have taken effect over the last three years in King, Pierce and Snohomish counties.

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State lobs antismoking billboards into tobacco ad wars 

The state's two-month, $100,000 antismoking campaign will involve 170 billboards in the Twin Cities area and eight outstate cities, said the Health Department's Carolyn Birnbaum.

The billboard designs were provided free by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the cost of production and placement is being paid by the Health Department with help from the National Cancer Institute, Birnbaum said.

The campaign is one of the final legacies of Minnesota's $1 million-a-year program to fight youth smoking. It will be supplanted beginning in 2000 by a much larger effort financed by settlement revenues.

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State Hopes Smokers Get the Message 

The billboard's message is clear: Secondhand smoke kills, and no one should feel guilty about demanding clean lungs. "Mind if I smoke?" asks the tuxedo-clad man of his equally well-dressed companion. "Care if I die?" she retorts.

Though the general idea has been around for years, this message has a harder edge than previous public-service campaigns. There's one other significant twist to the anti-smoking billboards that have poked up in Oklahoma City and Tulsa in recent weeks.

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Anti-smoking slogan on billboards irks Hunt 

Due to a misunderstanding with a printing company, dozens of billboards have gone up across North Carolina in recent weeks featuring a slogan that Gov. Jim Hunt didn't want motorists to see: "It's time we made smoking history." . . As many as 55 of the 59 billboards were botched, said Ann Houston of Project ASSIST, a state-run smoking cessation program that coordinated the signs here.

Houston said that she had "a communication problem" with the Tennessee company that printed most of North Carolina's signs.

She asked that the "tagline" be deleted from the billboard's design. She was referring to the slogan that Hunt found objectionable.

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Rally to be Held Marking Removal of the First Violation of The Tobacco Settlement 

``We are pleased that Wawa has listened to us and others and now sees the virtue of discontinuing all tobacco billboards,'' said Jeffrey Barg, chairman of the Tobacco-free Education and Action Coalition for Health (TEACH). ``But it is vitally important that Attorney General Fisher and tobacco companies such as Philip Morris make it clear that these sorts of billboards do in fact violate the tobacco settlement and that tobacco companies will use every means at their disposal to prevent this from happening and that Attorney General Fisher will ensure this as well. If Wawa characterizes its decision as purely voluntary, and that characterization is not corrected by the attorney general and the tobacco companies, then this incident could be viewed as giving license to other retailers to run tobacco billboards.''

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