Published: August 19, 2008 09:41 pm         

BRUCE KAUFFMAN: Marlboro Man: The birth of an icon

TERRE HAUTE — This week in 1949, Life magazine put on its cover Clarence Hailey Long, a working cowboy on a large Texas cattle ranch, and five years later Leo Burnett, the founder of a Chicago-based advertising agency, found himself recalling how strikingly masculine C.H. Long was, what with that rugged face, that cowboy get-up, and that cigarette dangling from his lips. An American icon was about to be born.

Burnett’s agency had just landed the Marlboro cigarette account, which, before 1954, had been marketed to women as a milder cigarette. That saddled Marlboro with the image of a “sissy” smoke, and saddled Phillip Morris, which produced Marlboros, with 1 percent market share. Phillip Morris hoped Burnett could change the cigarette’s image and sales numbers, and (ironically enough) Burnett used a saddle to do it. At an agency creative session, Burnett asked his creative team to name the most masculine image they could think of and, as Burnett suspected, the cowboy was the winner. The following year Burnett launched the “Marlboro Man” campaign, a series of ads featuring rugged cowboys (and other macho men such as hunters and blue-collar types) smoking Marlboros, and by the end of 1955 Marlboro sales had increased more than 3,000 percent.

But as sales increased, so did public awareness that cigarettes caused cancer. As a result, the Burnett ad agency experimented with various other marketing strategies — and models — that “softened” the cigarette’s image. As Burnett himself once said, “We couldn’t show cowboys forever.”

For once, he was wrong because nothing registered with the smoking public — at least the male half of it — like the cowboy, and in the mid-1970s a new version of the “Marlboro Man” campaign was created. New ads showed authentic cowboys, dressed in chaps, riding horses, holding rope, tying up calves, and a dozen other images — always with a Marlboro hanging from their lips — and every ad had a rugged western “Marlboro Country” landscape as background. By the end of the decade Phillip Morris was making a $1 million profit a day on Marlboros, which was America’s number one brand.

Burnett once labeled his Marlboro campaign, “dumbbell simple,” but the reasons for its success were actually rather nuanced and complicated. In an increasingly conformist world, Americans saw the Marlboro cowboys as the last of a dying breed — strong men, comfortable in their own skin, who prized their freedom and individuality. Millions of Americans hoped that smoking Marlboros would give them that same feeling, even if it lasted only a few minutes at a time.

Of course, speaking of a dying breed, since the first Marlboro campaign, some 15 million Americans have died from smoking-related diseases, including Wayne McLaren and David McLean — two former “Marlboro Men.”

Bruce Kauffmann’s e-mail address is bruce@historylessons.net.