R.J. Reynolds Reallocates Spending - No More Print Ads, More in Stores and Bars

R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, the second-largest tobacco company in the U.S, behind Philip Morris, has told its media buying agencies that it will not buy any print ads in consumer magazines and newspapers for its cigarette brands, including Camel, Winston, Pall Mall and American Spirit.

The company has decided to reallocate its marketing budget, moving the amount it used to spend on print - estimated at less than 5 percent of the hundreds of millions of dollars it spends each year on marketing - into other areas that make up the bulk of its marketing, writes The New York Times.

Those areas include out-of-home (particularly stores, bars and nightclubs), websites and direct mail.

Philip Morris stopped advertising in print three years ago.

The FTC pulls together data about marketing spending by tobacco companies; the most recent figures, for 2005, show that print advertising accounted for about $46.4 million of the total $13.1 billion spent on cigarette marketing that year. The print portion was divided between newspapers, at about $1.6 million, and magazines, at about $44.8 million.

Two recent disputes centered on R.J. Reynolds’s print ads may have helped the company move toward the decision.

One of the disputes centered around a foldout ad for Camel that ran in a recent issue of Rolling Stone. It came under fire from antismoking activists because it blurred the line between advertising and editorial content, they said. The other dispute, for a Camel brand aimed directly at women, focused on ads running in a slew of magazines. A Democratic congresswoman from California, Lois Capps, and 40 colleagues wrote to the publishers of 11 magazines, asking them to stop accepting ads for the product, saying the ads were geared toward girls and young women.

Giveaways for the brand have included berry lip balm, cellphone “jewelry,” small purses and wristbands, all in hot pink - as the Oregonian described it (via TobaccoFreeKids.org), the company that once marketed to kids with the Joe Camel cartoon character is doing it again with “Barbie Camel.”

Representative Capps said in a statement on Tuesday that the decision to stop print advertising was “a token concession.”

A company spokeswoman said, in the Winston-Salem (N.C.) Journal (via the Wall Street Journal) that the decision was unrelated to the Rolling Stone controversy, but that the company did take into account the protests over the Camel No. 9 ads.