John Safran’s Latest Book Puff Piece Tackles Big Tobacco’s Ultimate Weapon: Words
Australia is on its way to banning vapes: from October 1, it will be illegal to import vapes without a prescription.
The craze of vaping has prompted discussion, debate, and also fear: is it really better than smoking? How do you stop kid accesing them? What’s really in the disposable vapes you get from under the counter at corner shops? How do they make the cotton candy flavour taste so good?
Undoubtedly, it’s a debate that will rage on for time immemorial. But the vape debate has re-ignited a conversation that is inextricably linked to the world of advertising: the power and cockroach-esque immortality of Big Tobacco.
And, where there’s cigarette smoke, there’s fire – in the shape of Philip Morris.
In his new book Puff Piece, author and comedian John Safran looks at the world of Philip Morris, and the brilliant, insidious way they have weaponised language and branding.
The inspiration for this topic, Safran explained to B&T, was in fact an ad by the company.
“I was reading this ad a couple of World No Tobacco days ago,” he said (every year, the UN holds a World No Tobacco Day).
“On the eve of it, Philip Morris took out full page ads in the paper, and was saying: ‘we’re gonna shut down as a cigarette company, and relaunch as a health enterprise and trying to get the billion smokers of the world, including their own customers, off cigarettes’.”
A cigarette company rebranding as a health enterprise set some bells ringing in Safran’s head, though he says he initially took it at face value.
“Then I started snooping around, and I saw that it was a bit more complicated than that.”
“I was kind of curious about how it just wasn’t being covered anywhere, [particularly because of] this really meaningful thing that was happening. Because they [Phillip Morris] were be being hit really hard with the European Union ban on menthol cigarettes, and with a mind then to banning all cigarettes across Europe.”
In May 2020, the EU banned the sale of menthol cigarettes, as well as cigarettes with flavours like ‘vanilla’ or ‘candy’.
As Safran described it, the EU’s ban was not just “some anti-smoking ad campaign” or regulations like no longer being able to smoke in pubs.
“The European Union really banned the sale and production of all menthol cigarettes across Europe. So it was like, ‘Oh, my God, their backs against the wall’. And then I learned that [Philip Morris’s] little solution to this was by saying ‘yeah sure, we”ll stop producing menthol cigarettes and, oh, while we’ve got your attention, we’ve got this new product, I swear it’s not a cigarette. It’s a HeatStick’.”
Here, we get to the crux of Puff Piece: Philip Morris’s IQOS HeatStick. According to Philip Morris’s website, the HeatStick is a “smoke-free” alternative to cigarettes.
They describe the HeatStick as such: “PMI estimates that 14.7 million adult smokers have already switched to its IQOSHTPs and stopped smoking. PMI’s HTPs heat the tobacco just enough to release a nicotine-containing tobacco vapor, but without burning the tobacco.”
Safran’s book opens with him buying a HeatStick out of a car boot in the dead of night (they are not legal in Australia). And, it is the HeatStick question that led to the book’s real dominant theme: language.
“Everyone I show it to – and when I saw it the first time – goes ‘it’s tobacco rolled in paper, with a filter at one end, that you plant between your lips, inhaling nicotine and tobacco into your lungs’,” said Safran.
“How is that not a cigarette? And it’s like: it’s not a cigarette because I say it’s not one.”
“I just realized the power of words,” Safran continued.
“These lawmakers in Europe had successfully banned cigarettes and they had thrown up all this legislation. But they hadn’t factored in: what happens if Philip Morris just changes the word cigarette to HeatStick? As soon as they did that, Philip Morris wins from the jaws of defeat! They learn how to stay alive for the indefinite future.”
There is a common Twitter epithet, used so much that is has memeified into cliche: ‘Why is no one talking about this?’
Indeed, the phrase is so ubiquituous that it was used by comedian and writer Partricia Lockwood as the title of her latest novel.
But, in Safran’s case, it was true. No one was talking about this, or its implications.
“[I was] curious about what it said about us, about the world now, that Philip Morris can do this and no one notices. How is that possible when the biggest public health crisis [in the world] is cigarettes? I found in the book, 52 million people die of everything a year and out of those, 8 million are cigarette related, and Philip Morris is the biggest cigarette company. They clutch victory from the jaws of defeat, and there’s not an article about it, let alone a book…I looked on Twitter and like – nothing. So that obviously got me excited.”
“The big thing about this book was when I realized, ‘oh my god, this whole book can really be about words’, and about how the power of language and this Philip Morris gambit. You change the word cigarette to HeatStick [and] the word smoke to aerosol, you change the word tar to ‘nicotine free dry particulate matter’. The fact that they got away with it, and it worked – and it’s like life and death public health crisis, that I’ve kind of stumbled upon.”
It was, “[the most] high stakes example of the power of words.”
Part of the adventure of the book was that it was topic Safran professes to have known little about before he started. He also got to “bend all [of his] idiosyncratic” passions (words and Scrabble) to try and “crack the code of what was going on with Philip Morris”.
“I’d never thought about vapes, one way or the other. You know, it’s a bit like if suddenly someone sent me an assignment and said, ‘we’re going to look at cardboard’, or ‘we’re going to look at like Romanian gardening’ or something like that. So when I started this, I didn’t even really know what I was doing, what I was searching for, as such. I just felt a bit of an instinct.”
The book isn’t about Juul – arguably the brand who made vaping cool – nor is it about other tobacco companies. It was only about Philip Morris, Safran said, because they were the ones who said ‘we’re going to play these word games and see if they work’.”
“I actually caught up with a cigarette company, who also have a heat-not-burn device like the IQOS, but their own brand. And they just call it a cigarette!”
Of course, so much of this story ultimately comes back to the power of marketing – particularly Philip Morris’ attempted rebrand as a health enterprise, and of the marketing of the HeatSticks themselves.
“They market this is a better alternative to cigarettes, which even though they don’t quite say it, people hear that as a ‘safer alternative’ or a ‘healthier alternative’, even though they don’t actually say the word healthier.”
“I mean, this whole IQOS thing is very much a marketing thing and obviously, it’s like, brands wouldn’t pay, companies wouldn’t pay, for all this incredible advertising if they didn’t think it would work.”
One final reflection from Safran was on a brief period in his early twenties where he worked in advertising, an anecdote which didn’t, but could have, made it into Puff Piece:
“This kind of bugs me now, because I should have put it in the book. I talked about working at this ad agency in the book and some of the ads I did [and] that was at Clemenger Harvey. But I actually did work experience at Mojo Partners before I had the job, and they had Philip Morris as a client. And I knew this, it was like floating my head, but I never worked on the account or anything [and] I couldn’t really think of a particular story or whatever.”
However, there was a close call: “I remembered that one time when I was at Mojo, the account director of Philip Morris came over to where I was working and said, ‘Oh, listen, we’re going to have to get some names together for some the Philip Morris focus group thing – we just need some slogans and some new names…is that cool with you guys? I’ll come back with the brief’. I can’t remember what we said, but it just became one of those thing that never was followed up on. It kind of slipped through my fingers.”
Philip Morris may have slipped through Safran’s fingers once. It certainly hasn’t achieved that formidable feat a second time.
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