• Ad Age , Friday, December 12, 2008 11 AM

Feeling nostalgic for that morning hack? Ad Age has a video interview this morning with Dr. Robert Jackler, who put together the exhibition of cigarette advertising that's been at the Science, Industry and Business branch of the New York Library in Manhattan for several months and will run through Dec. 26.

The professor at Stanford School of Medicine started collecting the old ads after his mother, a lifelong smoker, developed lung cancer. Jackler grudgingly gives his due to the copywriters from the golden age of cigarette marketing. "They were clever. They had great subtlety in their messages, and I have great admiration for the genius," he says. "It was genius put to ill purpose, perhaps, but it was genius."

He doesn't hold back on contemporary cigarette marketing, however, charging that tobacco companies still subtly target young people.

It all reminds me of a scathing column about cigarette advertising that Ed McCabe, one of Madison Ave.'s great copywriters a generation or so ago, wrote for Adweek in the late 1980s. A lifelong smoker, McCabe disavowed cigarette advertising in no uncertain terms. I was then interested to read, in a Stuart Elliot column in the Times a few years later, that McCabe was still struggling to give up smoking. Been there .

Read the whole story at Ad Age »