Arthur "Art" Hawkins

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This article is part of the Tobacco portal on Sourcewatch funded from 2006 - 2009 by the American Legacy Foundation.

Arthur "Art" Hawkins was a principal with the New York based advertising and marketing firm Hawkins, McCain & Blumenthal, c. 1977. Previously Hawkins was creative director at KM&G Worldwide. [1]

Hawkins, McCain and Blumenthal (HMB) helped Brown & Williamson market a new menthol brand called Niagara. HMB revelled in all the possible marketing tie-ins available when using a natural wonder of the world to promote a cigarette. The name "Niagara" was especially attractive to marketers because "water and water images are the staples of menthol advertising."

HMB proposed holding a national competition to promote Niagara, asking people to create a symphonic piece called "Niagara Suite," giving a grant to help preserve the Niagara frontier ("tax deductible"), and also proposed a new film portraying the physical beauty and grandeur of Niagara Falls ("as opposed to the commercial and tourist aspects of Niagara"), and producing a film for TV: "Ralph Nader visits the Natural Wonders of the World to see how natural they are today." (Ralph Nader was considered an enemy of the tobacco industry for his early efforts to get smoking off of airplanes). The marketing company (Hawkins, McCain and Blumenthal) says,

"When you have one of the seven natural wonders of the world working for you,

the trick is not to change it, but to present it to the public in its most idealized fashion."[2]

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