One thing we’ve rather overlooked here is the rise of so-called e-cigarettes, battery-driven gaspers which are supposedly better for you than the conventional variety (no carbon monoxide, I think).
So you can advertise them, on the telly too it seems.
Now Skycig, which claims to be the ‘world’s premium’ e-cigarette has appointed London indie creative agency Brothers and Sisters to handle its advertising launch in the UK, worth a projected £20m – which is a pretty decent budget. The e-cigarette market in the UK is reported to be worth £250m, which makes it a very decent budget.
Brothers and Sisters founder and ECD Andy Fowler says: “SKYCIG is a truly innovative company in an exciting new growth sector. This is an opportunity to establish the first great brand in an emerging category.” The campaign is expected to run across TV, digital, outdoor, press and cinema.
Ironically old-style gaspers prompted some of the most notable advertising produced in the 1960s and 70s – Marlboro’s famous cowboy of course (which goes back way further than that) and Collett Dickenson Pearce’s epic campaigns for Benson & Hedges, Silk Cut and Hamlet cigars. One reason for the latter being that even in those days, before cigarette and then cigar ads were banned, you couldn’t say very much about the product.
So the team of creative crazies at CDP, which included at various times Paul Weiland, Dave Horry, Alan Waldie, Terry Lovelock and Charles Saatchi (chain-smoking Charlie made his name producing anti-smoking ads like the famous ‘Pregnant Man’ for the Health Education Authority) were free to launch a number of very funny and sometimes surreal campaigns on an unsuspecting public.
Utterly mad. Doubt that Brothers and Sisters will follow (or be allowed to follow) this particular route – shame.
