Tobacco Sponsorship

A few days ago I mentioned that Lotus introduced tobacco sponsorship to Formula One - 1968 / Imperial Tobacco's Gold Leaf brand of smokes. Due to in-place advertising restrictions on tobacco brands sponsorship became the dominant marketing force for tobacco manufacturers. The growth was explosive, the tobacco money was huge, and the impact lasting. Given the expansive tobacco budgets pit lane quickly became a contest between those with and those without - and operating budgets swelled to as much as $300M a year. Coincidentally, these boom years coincided with amazing developments in engine technology, aerodynamic understanding, Non-tobacco teams simply couldn't compete on the smaller budgets.

In 1976 however Germany outlawed tobacco sponsorship, followed in 1984 by Great Britain and France in 1992. Oddly, as the global shift in tobacco marketing headed to greater restrictions, more tobacco manufacturers sought refuge in the world of Formula One. As a result, the very savvy Bernie Ecclestone was able to create a temporary safe haven and get exemptions for teams for a number of years.

Craftily, as car designers and engineers find their way through the rule books looking for loop holes and the unique advantage, so too have Formula One marketers sound escape clauses for marketing tobacco products without promoting them. The first instance of this that I can remember was redesigning both the camel image and the Joe Camel likeness for placement on the cars at banned races.


Significantly more successful is the wordplay iteration that Jordan F1 created for Benson & Hedges by modifying their script-based logo:
"Bitten & Hisses" in 1997 - mascot was the snake Hissing Sid
"Buzzing Hornets" 1998 - 2000 - mascot was a hornet
"Bitten Heroes" 2001 - mascot was a shark
"Be On Edge" (BENSON & HEDGES) from 2002 onwards

Marlboro, the long term sponsor of Scuderia Ferrari as taken a more graphically subliminal approach. Because of the now European-wide ban on marketing, they are not allow to display their image, likeness, brand assets, or logo anywhere on the car or uniforms. They have however substituted the spelled out Marlboro for black bars, kept the red and white color scheme, but replaced their white chevron with white boxes. No one can claim that there is anything remotely brand oriented, and yet the identification is unmistakable. Since Marlboro's contact runs till 2011 it remains to be seen what innovative ways they will market their brand in the highly regulated world of tobacco advertising. Oh, the budget for 5 years = $1B