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Jump to full article: Avatar Movie Fansite (blog), 2010-01-26
Intro:
• More than a million current US smokers ages 12-17 were recruited to smoke by their repeated exposure to smoking on screen. Of this group, about 400,000 will eventually die of tobacco-induced diseases.
• Avatar has delivered an estimated 100 million tobacco impressions to US audiences alone as of today. If the sales projections are valid, the advertising value of the film's tobacco impressions worldwide, theatrical and non-theatrical, can be conservatively estimated at $50 million. (That equals an entire Bud Light campaign.)
• Tobacco will kill 5 million people worldwide this year. The toll is climbing toward 10 million. The fastest growth in smoking is among girls in emerging markets. Next to infectious disease, tobacco is the #1 cause of preventable death, globally. US movies are now the single most important vector of the tobacco epidemic.
It's fun to fantasize about defending other cultures from commercial rapine. Stopping the major film studios from knowingly pushing tobacco addiction and death at kids around the world is the real thing."
Consumer's Union says: Media critic Mark Crispin Miller expressed concern about the saturation of our environment with hidden advertising. These product plugs, writes Miller, "work as subliminal inducements because their context is ostensibly a movie, not an ad, so that each of them comes sidling toward us dressed up as non-advertising." Particularly in the case of children, such hidden advertising has great potential to mislead and deceive.
Advertising invites skepticism. When others urge us to do what they want, one is alerted to the possibility that their wishes may not be in our best interest. But product placements and advertorials disarm children and keep their defenses down. Use of such techniques to advertise to kids demonstrates a failure of marketers to play fair, and a failure of self-monitoring by the media as a way of protecting kids from undue pressures to buy. As such, it invites regulation.
For a more complete list, and great info about Hollywood and the tobacco industry's long, torrid commercial relationship, see http://www.smokefreemovies.ucsf.edu/problem/brand_id.html. It includes Marlboro in the modern-day scenes in James Cameron's Titanic.
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