Savvy marketing techniques ensure many a queer keeps on puffing, observes Steve Dow.

Tobacco companies always knew how to handsomely market their death sticks, and it’s no wonder gays smoke. Brad Pitt for instance was once enlisted to hand out cigarette samples. Mind you, before Pitt’s arse made its debut in Thelma and Louise, it was also alternately zipped up in a chicken suit to promote the El Pollo Loco restaurant chain, and seated in a limousine to ferry strippers to bachelor parties.

In the age of the internet, the conflation of cigarettes and celebrity is bigger than in Hollywood’s heyday of blowing smoke rings into the audience’s consciousness from the big silver screen. The 1930s cool of Bette Davis voraciously smoking her Lucky Strikes though is somewhat lacking on billions of little private computer screens.

Today we have celebrity cultural punchline Amy Winehouse fresh from an emphysema diagnosis – paparazzi images of the erstwhile singer with a cigarette dangling from her lips cut and paste into blogs everywhere. Her father has warned just one cigarette will kill her. Heck, that’s only if she doesn’t stub it out on her own face.

Tobacco companies need to make smoking cool again, and who could be cooler than you? In this age of consumer-generated content, dubbed Web 2.0, you too can become a smoking marketeer. You can add twirling animated Winfield packets to your MySpace site or join Facebook support groups such as “i bet i can find a million ppl that want smoking back in pubs”. Well, 6200 so far, anyway.

In a recent study, Becky Freeman and Simon Chapman of the University of Sydney plugged into You Tube and found 29,325 videos tagged ‘smoking’. One smoking fetish video showed two women blowing smoke into each others’ mouths, and had attracted 221,033 views, and 142 mostly positive comments (eg, “Smokin’ HOT HOT HOT. Loved it”). Do tobacco companies or independent users post this sort of content? Freeman and Chapman don’t rightly know. The tobacco companies have cleverly learned to fly under the radar.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 90 per cent of cigarette customers get hooked on nicotine before the age of 19. Young people apparently like the taste of menthol, and a new study published this month in the American Journal of Public Health suggests the tobacco industry has been manipulating the levels of menthol in cigarettes to appeal to young smokers.

Here in Australia we have the news that Qantas is about to reintroduce the sale of cigarettes on international flights, much to the chagrin of anti-smoking groups. How clever can it be to give poor nicotine addicts a box of cigarettes and tell them they can’t smoke them for 20 hours?

I’m all for making the trolley dollies into cigarette sales folk again. While they’re at it, make the poor smoking sods on a long haul watch an in-flight film of Brad or Julia smoking their latest product placement, and give them a burst of Ben Lee’s Cigarettes Will Kill You on the radio channel.

Steve Dow is a Sydney journalist. Visit www.stevedow.com.au

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