Camel Smokes

Imagine your gynecologist setting you up on a date with someone riddled with herpes. Or your accountant referring you to a financial planner with the ethics of Bernard Madoff.

Might make you a little queazy, right?

You bet. But that’s exactly the positioning this ad is using. Giving an implied medical endorsement to a particular brand of cigarettes.

Kinda funny how times have changed, isn’t it?

For sure! I especially like the closing line on the top of the ad: “A few winks of sleep… a few puffs of a cigarette… and he’s back at that job again.”

(Why they didn’t say “a few puffs on a Camel,” I’m not exactly sure. After all, you really don’t care about doctors endorsing “smoking,” you care about the endorsement of this particular brand.)

The other thing you want to pay attention to is, “According to a recent nationwide survey, More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.”

You need to realize, all this means is you do “a survey” of doctors across the country and tally their results. It DOESN’T mean you survey EVERY doctor in America to get these numbers.

And it also doesn’t mean you call your five doctor buddies you know, either. It means you survey a reasonable number of doctors and tell the truth about your results.

People do this all day long.

The other cool thing about this ad is in the lower right-hand corner, where they talk about the “T-Zone.”

See, back when this ad was created, cigarettes were fairly new. And when your customer isn’t sure how to evaluate whether something is good or not — which is often the case when selling new products and services — it’s up to you to explain it to them.

And in this case, (much like how Claude Hopkins did it with Pepsodent toothpaste), this T-Zone is also a good involvement device because it gets your customers deliberately physically involved and “aware” of their product usage.

Any time you get people involved, it creates rapport and comfort with your product or service.

If you like these kinds of ad critiques, make sure you download my 30-Day Cash Flow Surge Program for free – you’ll see more ad analysis in this program, and definitely in the Seductive Selling Newsletter.