When it comes to the advertising of harmful products, the tobacco industry is one that has been the focus of critic’s worldwide. For years, the tobacco industry has been known to advertise not just cigarettes, but a life style. Many of the older ad campaigns used to contain an attractive male figure either smoking a cigarette, or with a lit cigarette in his hand. And, of course there was always a beautiful, and yet somewhat helpless woman by his side. This type of advertising represents the thought that smoking cigarettes is not only the manly thing to do, but it will also attract beautiful women.

Another issue pertaining to the cigarette industry in regards to the advertisement of harmful products is the tobacco industries tendency to withhold information. Although we know now that the nicotine in cigarettes can cause cancer, the companies producing cigarettes know that this information is obviously harmful for business, so they tend to either shine little or no light that their products can have fatal results. This type of advertising is harmful to the consumer, because although in this generation it is secondhand knowledge that smoking can kill, advertisements that tend to make smoking cigarettes look glorious stray people away from the facts, and that’s not a coincidence. Advertising in the tobacco industry does the exact opposite of the entire point of advertising in the first place; informing consumers. These companies are distracting us from the facts, and thus advertising harmful products that are against the codes of media ethics.

With that, according to Latour, tobacco companies have even been recently aiming towards a younger audience; kids! I chose this image above because I think it has a good satirical sense in what I, and Latour are trying to explain. The book uses the example of the recent Joe cigarette ad that is geared toward children, in trying to get them into a life threatening habit at such a young age. This image of course is not a serious one, but then again are tobacco companies really being serious when they advertise cigarettes towards children? To me, this is simply insane! I find this image amusing in the sense that it’s saying to advertisers, are you really going to subject our children to such habits through the advertising of harmful products? This, for sure, is an extreme example of a violation of advertising ethics. Although some measures have been taken to save at least the children and future generations (by taking out tobacco ads in magazines often read by children) from this habit, the issue still remains in that advertisers should be punished for such harsh violations of their code of ethics.

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