Springtime Fresh

TOBACCO Springtime Fresh

Between the Federal Trade Commisssion and their own industry's self-imposed Cigarette Advertising Code, cigarette salesmen have just about been reduced to saying that a smoke is only a smoke. Among the many guidelines and prohibitions set by both the FTC and the code, as administered by former New Jersey Governor Robert Meyner, was one against advertising claims of low nicotine and tar content.

On that one, the FTC recently reversed itself, argued that information about nicotine and tar might be not only "material" but also "desired by the consuming public" as long as it came without collateral health claims. Behind the FTC switch was the suspicion that some companies had used the ban on any sort of nicotine-tar advertising as protection against adverse publicity while actually stepping up nicotine and tar content in their products. That content presumably enhances flavor--and "flavor" is the big word in cigarette advertising nowadays.

To P. Lorillard Co., the FTC's new stance seemed springtime fresh. Under the FTC ban on nicotine-tar advertising, Lorillard's Kent, once the runaway leader of the filter pack, has slipped from 11% of the filter market in 1958 to 5.9%, while the company's overall sales have gone from 1963's record $521 million to last year's $479 million. In both its Kent and Newport brands, Lorillard is pretty certain that it can outdo the field in low nicotine and tar content.

No sooner had the FTC announced its turnabout than Lorillard told Code Administrator Meyner that it would no longer feel obliged to observe the code, at least so far as the restriction on nicotine and tar talk went. At word of Lorillard's defection, Meyner quickly secured repledges of allegiance from eight other major cigarette companies, said that no immediate changes in the industry's code were contemplated.

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