ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more. Hi, I'm Dee Madigan. Today, the final episode of Where the Bloody Hell Were You? Advertising with a social conscience arrives in our living rooms at last. Every cigarette is doing you damage. I know, he's not talking to me. Put on a few kilos. If I can do it. But I'm not worried. Don't be a Wally with water. Crash without a seatbelt. i reckon we all can realize your full potential and never give up
In the early days of television advertising, it was pretty well a free-for-all. Agencies were fiercely competitive for the clients with the biggest budget. And of course the clients that spent the most money. were the tobacco companies. In the 1950s, more than three quarters of Australian men smoked. and the percentage of women who were taking up the habit was rising quickly. And advertising played a key role. Good evening and welcome to television.
Television arrives in Australia in 1956 and the first advertisement on TV is for Rothman's cigarettes. Robert Crawford, Professor of Advertising and Media History. For consumers, new to television, everything was a novelty. The advertisements, what was being sold, the way they were selling it. With the best tobacco money combined. Country life cigarettes have the taste that's right. They were already from day one on the front foot.
as a tool to sell their product. The tobacco industry particularly was very good at convincing people that it was a smooth, smart thing to do. advertising is what builds the brand when only the best will do And isn't that all the time? Dunhill, the most distinguished tobacco house in the... They also were one of the first industries to understand the power of imagery. You are selling a cigarette but you're selling a whole lifestyle that goes with it.
a way of seeing and imagining yourself. Forward-looking people look to modern ideas, the auto-wash. Forward-looking people look for the latest in modern living. About this time, a new version of the Australian self And the new boy at Hertz Walpole, Alan Johnston, was in the right place at the right time. His boss Jim had seen a bloke on the telly that sounded like he just might fit the bill. G'day. I'm Alan Johnston. We'd been briefed by Rossmann's to launch a new cigarette.
I've been asked to talk, you see, and being a suave, sophisticated man about town, I thought I'd do the job with a bit of, you know, polish, a touch of class. We had a knockabout bloke called Paul Hogan, very knockabout. We had the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, or most of it.
backing him. We had him in a dinner suit and that, but he was still very awkward. G'day. I've been asked to talk to you, see. I'll get the boys back here to set the scene with a bit of the old mood music. It wouldn't have been accepted in most companies. A lot of people were terrified on the day of the shoot.
None of the usual executives turned up to the shoot because they thought it was going to be a disaster, frankly. That's the truth. These new wind fields are 40 cents. That's about the price you should be paying for a good smoke. Paul Hogan comes on. He takes the piss out of other tobacco advertisements, speaking in a broad Australian accent, laconic.
So, again, this whole image of Winfield as the bloke's cigarette. Sir Ronald Irish was running Rossmann's. He was chairman in those days. And he rang up Reg Wasser and said, can you get that uncouth person? Get him off here. It's rude and uncouth. And Reg said, but we're selling a million sticks a day, which is how they used to talk. Well, all right, can you get him to pronounce things a little more clearly?
Marlborough in Australia had the biggest market share in the world and after Hogan and Winfield It simply collapsed. Anyhow. And there had been nothing like that in cigarettes at all. Interestingly, Paul Hogan later would rue his involvement in that campaign. It was so powerful that his resonance with kids... meant that kids were taking up smoking. And that's one of the things that started to turn against that campaign. Such was its success.
Although the late 1960s brought confirmation that tobacco was a major cause of death and disease, female smoking rates continued to rise, reaching one third. by the early 1970s, and male smoking rates were still much higher. There was increasing pressure on the government. to act, doing nothing was becoming more and more difficult. To counter the power of advertising by the large tobacco firms, the governments would also need to engage in that very medium that had built up tobacco to sort of...
have deconstructed. So the government decided to dip into the kitty. The huge influx of dollars from tobacco tax rises kicked off health promotion. The newly elected Whitlam government then pledged half a million dollars and put Bernie MacKay in charge of a trial anti-smoking campaign. on the New South Wales north coast. The smell of the alternative cigarette sweetens the main street air. This hippie movement, as you call it, we call it the Aquarius movement.
At that stage, the Aquarius Festival had just finished in Nimmin, or in the early 70s, 72, and there were a whole lot of people that went to the Aquarius Festival and then decided they'd like to have an alternative lifestyle on the North Coast. and that's where I was able to recruit some very good people. Basically use anti-smoking advertising to try and convince the population to change. One in particular was John Bevans. I'm John Bevans. I got into advertising straight out of school in 1963.
The BC stands for Bryce Courtney, who was the young creative director at the time. He seemed old to me. I think he was probably about 26. We were approached by the New South Wales Department of Health, Brian Slapp and myself, and it was almost like a guerrilla tactic, but to make some anti-smoking ads. There was a kind of a sense of subversion. We sat down and actually...
putting ads together to run on television to produce, hopefully, community backlash against smoking. The idea was that if this campaign was successful, it would be rolled out. into New South Wales. I remember going and speaking to a guy called Dr Gary Egger and just saying well can you explain you know what's the issue with cigarettes why are they bad and he said
He said, the lung, your lung is like a sponge and it soaks up smoke. When we heard this fact that Gary Egger had given us, the commercial pretty well wrote itself. The human lung is like a sponge. A sponge designed to soak up air. You know, Brian was a fantastic art director and he designed the cutout figure of a man. with a household sponge stuck on his chest. And we just shot that commercial. We had the voiceover say...
The human lung is like a sponge, a sponge designed to soak up air. But some people use it to soak up smoke. But some people... use it to soak up smoke. If the average smoker could wring out what goes into his lungs, The tobacco companies claim that it wasn't correct, that that wouldn't have been the amount of tar that came into a beaker and so on. And so we just simply rewrote the script slightly.
and said... If the average smoker could collect... ..could collect and wring out what goes in his lungs every year, he'd find this much cancer-producing tar. And we got it back on, but it was off for about, I don't know, four weeks or something like that. Cigarette by cigarette, these ASX die. Until you're out of breath. But some people use their lungs to soak up cigarette smoke. Fortunately, some quit smoking before they quit breathing.
I was signing up for life. It took me 15 years to realise. Then it cut me like a knife. Many agencies were financially reliant on these powerful clients. and the clients relied on the power of advertising. The anti-smoking lobby was emerging as a thorn in both their sites. and its power was growing. The effectiveness of the anti-smoking campaign gave the government confidence and further galvanised public sentiment. Arthur Chesterfield Evans is a veteran of the movement.
Once the government put health ads on television, they were effectively saying yes, those other ads shouldn't have been there. here's the truth and we all, this is the norm now. The norm is this stuff's really bad and you should stop. And we got some pretty impressive drops in smoking rates. Give up now. Haven't you coughed up enough? The Lismore area had the greatest decrease, with a 16% drop within a short time of the advertisement airing.
Tobacco ads were officially taken off television in 1976, but they continued outdoors and no one could ignore those pervasive billboards. You could still drive along in the street and you'd see the ads for Winfield or the ads for Rothmans, et cetera. Three graffitists met at a billboard. Formal complaints were listed, logged and seemingly forgotten. So in 1979, a group calling themselves Bugger Up armed themselves with spray cans and took matters into their own hands.
Arthur Chesterfield-Evans joined them. Bugger Up stood for Billboard utilising graffiti against unhealthy promotions. This guerrilla campaign was the only option that was available to these people, actually pointing out what this ad is doing. Yeah, well this is a really good little device that we've worked out. See, if the billboards are only fairly low, we use the can normally. But if it's a high billboard, we can extend up to there or even further.
I'm Dr Arthur Chesterfield-Evans. I'd seen bugger-ups work around the place because they were pretty ubiquitous. I saw a lot of tobacco-caused disease and that got me very upset about tobacco. and so I joined BuggerUp in order to do something about that. I was working in cardiothoracic surgery at the time at North Shore Hospital.
and I was a registrar. And one day a guy came in, he was a very nice chap, and he smoked benton and hedges, and he'd had this massive heart attack. And his heart was so bad that as one half of his heart contracted, the other calf sort of bloomed out so that it was sort of...
It wasn't pumping, nothing was coming out because there's one half contracted, the other bloomed out. And I looked at his scan. I said, gee, that's a bad heart. And he was only 52. He was a businessman, very intelligent, had a lovely wife and two lovely daughters anyway. We went and operated on him. After the operation, we had a lot of trouble getting him off the support pump, you know, like he was, his heart just would not do the job. And he was in intensive care.
After the operation, of course, I was the registrar, so I was looking after the intensive care unit. And, you know, the boss had gone home to bed. And about three o'clock in the morning, his heart stopped. And so I started pumping away and rang the boss. I said, what am I going to do? He said, oh, he said, Pump him with your hands, you know. So I opened his chest with the wire cutters and put my hand in. It was pumping away with his heart in my hand.
The boss said, you know, keep pumping till I get there. So he came in at about half past three in the morning. And he... took over and he was pumping away for a while. And he said, tell me what happened, Arthur. And I described all the arrhythmias and the blood pressure fall and so on. And he said, oh, you've done everything right. You followed the protocol. No point in this, is it? So I pulled the sheet over and said, you go and talk to the relative. I went outside and the...
The corridor was only half lit because they turned the lights down at night, and his wife was there. A nice looking woman and he had two daughters I suppose about 14 and 12 and the tears were streaming. down their faces, and they said, why does this happen, doctor? And I said, And that wasn't a very good answer. But I thought to myself, it wasn't one of those things that was bent in here, just killed that man.
And anyway, I went back to bed, you know, about five o'clock in the morning. I had a couple of hours sleep and then we had to start again, of course, at seven o'clock the next morning. And that day I work the next day as well as one does. And I was exhausted because I'd been up, you know, all night.
My girlfriend at the time said, I said, look, I just want to go to bed. And she said, oh, you always got to go to bed. You never go out. We never go out. I said, OK, OK, we'll go to the movies. So anyway, we went off to the movies in George Street. And we sort of walked through all the kids smoking outside the movie. And we got into the movie and the mild brown man wrote on the screen. Because you could sit at cinema advertising. And I said, I'm going to stop this if it's the last thing I do.
Bagger Up were being far more successful than the people writing letters. So from my point of view, the question was, was I going to join Bagger Up or was I going to stay with the people who stayed legal? And I thought, well, the question here is, you know, it's obvious what needs to be done and it's obvious who's doing the right thing and it's obvious who's the most effective. So the question for me was, well, are you a wimp or not?
My question, when you look at your conscience, look in the mirror and say, are you a wimp, Arthur? No, I don't want to be a wimp. I'll go and do a billboard. So that's what got me going, really. And I stepped back and it looked terrific. There was come to poison country and I just thought that's it. I've started something right now. Australia was leading the world in social marketing. It really switched on.
very, very progressive. The effectiveness of the anti-smoking ads showed that the medium need not be restricted to issues of consumption. Philip Adams and his agency, MDA, were one of the first to embrace community service advertising, or as we call it now, social marketing. having simultaneously been employed in the engine room of capitalism, always felt a bit off about it. So what I used to do was seek to expiate guilt by doing morality-worthy advertising campaigns.
So I used to do an awful lot of pro bono work for the Anti-Cancer Council. Advertising agencies often, and still today, do this pro bono work. And it does two things. On the one hand... It enables them to give back to the community. But on another hand, it gives them the freedom. to be quite creative with their work. Controversial cull of hundreds of kangaroos. Bring kangaroo numbers down to sustainable... Well, you had a campaign to stop the culling of kangaroos.
the social campaign but it was also a campaign that was used to advertise the advertising agency which was in fact philip adams agency and philip adams would go on to become well-known for his social advertising, particularly during the 70s and 80s. And a young minister for sport in the Victorian Liberal government came to see me. He was desperate to get people to do exercise and he'd been asking a few people to do a lot. He expected a handful at least.
Victorians, Melburnians to go on marathons. And I said, no, this is not the right way to do it. We've got to ask a lot of people to do a little, flip the whole thing over upside down. And I came up with the idea of a campaign that would use chirpy animation, funny, engaging, likeable, to make gentle suggestions to people on simple exercises like tossing a frisbee or taking a dog for a walk.
Well, my diet's balanced. The 16 is on this side. Balance the five cakes and the three dogs on this side. Oh, I feel crook. I went to my dear friend, Alex Stitt. who died recently, and Al was probably Australia's greatest professional designer and animator. And Al and I cooked up life beat. I'm walking There are fewer restrictions. The client is so happy to have an agency coming on board and doing a professional job for them that they give them that creative licence.
So agencies are able to use this to advertise themselves. Have you caught this bloke on the telly? Interrupting me favourite show with a tinny arranged on his belly. Reminds me of someone I know. Not that I'm against physical fitness, don't get me wrong on that score. I could watch all them fit blokes forever, but me thumb's inclined to get sore. Anything that... that seemed to me to be less immoral or amoral than flogging detergent. And so, you know, I became the king of social engineering.
Life be in it, I think, fires the starting gun for this era and nothing was ever the same again. So when this bloke says, life be in it, be in it, he says on TV, I'll give him a nod and change channel. Because I know he's not talking to me. Get out. Australia's love of a tinny in front of the telly wasn't curbed by the need to drive. Road accidents involving alcohol were climbing steadily.
According to John Bevans, by the 1980s, the stats were horrific. He was called in again. But this time he ignored the advertising brief he was given. In 1982, I got a call. and was invited to go to a meeting with Peter Cox, who was a Minister for Transport. And he gave me the best brief that I've ever been given in advertising. It was nine words. He simply said,
I want to get the blood off the roads. And he was a politician who sincerely wanted to do something about drink driving. Because back in 1982, I mean, we all did it. have a few beers, get into the car and drive home. It was illegal but There was no risk that you'd get caught. If you had an accident and it was shown that you'd been driving under the influence, then you could be charged with DUI.
but there was no deterrence in place. Random breath testing was due to be introduced in December in 1982, just prior to Christmas. The RTA, the Road and Traffic Authority, Their brief was that we need to explain and the procedure of random breath testing. So it was to be an information campaign. And it didn't seem right. This was not about giving people information. It was about stopping them from drinking and driving.
perhaps go out with the highway patrol to kind of get a sense for what was happening. So I went out with two highway patrol officers and they set up a speed trap on Flat Rock Drive at Camaray. So let me see what would happen when they caught somebody who'd been drink driving.
Random breath testing had not been introduced, so they couldn't pull people over and randomly breath test them. They had to wait until somebody had been, you know, some other kind of traffic infringement, so speeding was a perfect... to catch people and then if they suspected that the person had been drinking they'd get them to blow in the bag. We'd be sitting in the patrol car and the officer would say look that guy on the
car in front has been drinking. I said how do you know and he said because see the way he's just sort of clipping the lane as he goes around the corner. So they would pull him over and... you know, get the person out of the car. And the person was, you know, you could tell he was seriously affected by alcohol. What I observed was the fear that people had when they were pulled over for drink driving and the humiliation that they suffered.
One guy that we caught was sitting in the back of the car being taken to the police station because if they blew into the bag back in those days and they failed the breath test there, they had to be taken back to the police station and given a breathalyser.
they could prove that they were over the limit. And this guy was sitting in the back of the police car, next to me actually. I was sitting in the back there too. And he was saying, you can't arrest me. He said, I've got friends in high places. So I could see the humiliation of being arrested and to think that you could be arrested for having a few beers. People just couldn't comprehend and the way that they would try and talk themselves out of it was a really...
insight. So out of that night came simply the phrase, how will you go when you sit for the test? Will you be under 05 or under arrest? advertising often writes itself if you get out there and just watch what's going on the ads will write themselves That campaign ran with a jingle, because it was still in the days of the jingle, and I was hugely influenced by Mojo. I mean, I just, I was such a great admirer of those guys.
The advertising campaign, it was a big lie. It kind of told the truth, but it twisted the truth because it said, how will you go when you sit for the test? will you be under 05 or under arrest? It didn't say if you sit for the test. So it created this sense everybody was going to be tested. And I believe that. And the night that random breath testing was launched, people had the choice. Do I give up driving or do I give up...
drinking. It was coming up to Christmas. Most people chose to go out and have a few beers The role of the advertising to amplify the deterrence. The news the day after random breath testing was launched was The front page news that people just couldn't get home. The trains were packed, there was chaos at Circular Quay, people couldn't get ferries.
Nobody, you know, realised that behaviour would literally be changed overnight. And it was. The success of the social marketing campaigns of the 1970s and 80s showed that advertising had become an indispensable tool for non-commercial groups to get their message to the masses. I think you're working with people who really had the guts to make change. I wonder what's this red button do? It could kill more Australians than World War II. It's enough to make her sick. Very sick.
Social marketing has subsequently become more targeted in its approach. Scientists call it a micro-sleep. Speed. You don't know what it'll do to you. Safety switches cut the power fast enough to save lives. Yet it's promise of living a better life. remains the same. And ironically, this is the very same message that commercial advertisers have been selling us all along.
And that was the final episode in our series Where the Bloody Hell Were You? If you miss the others, don't despair. You can find them at the RN homepage. The sound engineer was Russell Stapleton. Content advisor was Robert Crawford. And Where the Bloody Hell Were You was produced by Ros Blewett. I'm Dee Madigan, and thank you for your company. You've been listening to an ABC podcast. Discover more great ABC podcasts, live radio and exclusives on the ABC.