Somehow I thought it might be difficult to slip this one by 🙁
Our Smoking Girl Gets Censored; from an email received by SuperArtMedia:
I have some bad news about your commercial. Our Traffic Manager viewed the spot and told me that we cannot air it because it features someone smoking.
There wouldn’t be an issue if the girl was in the background smoking, but this isn’t the case in your commercial. This is not a rule set by Comcast but rather one set by the advertising industry.
I’m not sure if you have time to produce another spot or revise the current one. One idea I had was to use the one from last year (if you still have it) and revise it with the new dates and times.
Sorry that we can’t use it. Let me know how you want me to proceed.
Curiously, another EMRL spot also featured smoking, but was accepted for broadcast (by the same cable network) without incident. It was in heavy rotation for a little over one year.
Check This Out
The last cigarette commercial (for Virginia Slims) was broadcast on the Johnny Carson Tonight Show, December 31, 1970. It was expected to be devastating for the [television] networks when tobacco ads were banned in 1971 – but they did all right without them, in spite of immediately losing $220 million dollars a year in ad revenues. Now they make more than that from anti-smoking ads! From http://www.tvparty.com/vaultcomcig.html.
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