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IT ALL SMOKE!
Americans are smoking 430 billion cigarettes this year. 10 a day for every male and female over 13. 30 billion, to American troops overseas. King-size or short, whatever your preference in size or flavor, advertising is responsible.
By JAMES L. HARTE
AMERICANS smoked 430 billion cigarettes in 1952. Our authority for this figure is the Bureau of Agricultural Economics in the United States Department of Agriculture. It is an increase of 40 billion over the 1951 consumption.
It means that, on a per capita breakdown, every American, male and female, 1 5 years of age and older, averaged ten smokes a day for the year!
And, states the Bureau, as if it had counted sales in advance, this record will be broken in 1953, as consumption continues to increase.
Six billion cigars likewise went up in smoke this past year, an increase of four percent over 1951. Sales of finecut tobacco, scrap, twist, and plug, however, have been dropping gradually since 1945. On the whole, tobacco users spent 5.1 billion dollars for tobacco products in 1952 as compared with 4.7 billion dollars the previous year. And Uncle Sam is
pleased, for out of every five dollars spent by the consumer, two dollars lands in the Government's tax coffers!
The extraordinary part of this is that the figures are, frankly, a distinct tribute to the art of advertising. All tobaccos are basically the same. This is true now and has always been. Advertising is responsible for the keen competition and skyrocketing sales within the tobacco industry. One of the big three among the cigarette manufacturers discovered this fact the hard way a few years ago. It cut 4 million dollars from its advertising budget for the year, believing its cigarette would sell itself. The result was a sales loss of 20 million dollars.
The industry as a whole took heed of the lesson and today, as a group, tobacco manufacturers are the largest, biggest-spending advertisers in the country. For example, more money has been spent pushing Lucky Strikes than any other single product sold in the nation. And the expenditure has paid