But by the late 1980s, tobacco firms could read the writing on the billboard. Sports sponsorships, cartoon characters, and trinkets clearly labeled yesterday's marketing efforts to children and youths. Reynolds Tobacco Company had built its fortune by marketing to “the young, poor, black, and stupid.” 1 A tobacco executive who risked such candor today might add, “the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and Hispanic.” But such loose talk is very unlikely today because a series of legal reversals and losses in the court of public opinion have created an acutely circumspect tobacco consortium.ĭecades ago, flagrant, disrespectful stereotypes marked the industry's initial courting of African Americans. A DECADE AGO, FORMER Winston honcho David Goerlitz sneered that the R.
