Ted Bates & Company

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

Ted Bates & Company was an advertising agency for Brown & Williamson and other tobacco companies.

Description

Ted Bates was an advertising agency for Brown & Williamson and wrote report which stated that there "are not any real, absolute, positive qualities and attributes in a cigarette." (Jenkins p. 130.) Ted Bates & Company generated a memo that said, "Smokers have to face the fact that they are illogical, irrational and stupid . . . The saviors are the rationalization and repression . . . " (E. Whelan 1984).

Ted Bates helped the Tobacco Institute devise a series of ads to help counteract the publication of the 1967 Surgeon General's Report, The Health Consequences of Smoking: A Public Health Service Review. Following is partial copy from one of five ads Ted Bates & Company drafted and tested for the Tobacco Institute in the wake of the publication of the Report:

"COMMUNISM CAUSES CANCER

You don't believe it? Well, wait a second. Let's use the same kind of statistical analysis the Public Health Service is using to 'prove' that cigarettes cause cancer. We'll use only statistical facts taken from bona fide population surveys.

1. Americans smoke a lot and some of them die of lung cancer. The Dutch smoke less than Americans, but more of them die of lung cancer.

2. The Australians smoke a lot and some of them die of lung cancer. The British smoke as much as the Australians, but twice as many British have lung cancer...

One statistical inference is very clear. In each pair of countries, the higher cancer rate is in the country closer to the Iron Curtain...By the same means that some public servants are using to indict cigarettes, we've just proved that Communism causes cancer. But you know and we know, Communism is not guilty. And nobody yet knows about cigarettes."

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