Salem Cigarettes – “Springtime Freshness!”
I don’t have to point out that smoking is bad for you! What gets me, more than the product in this ad is the whole psychotic “springtime freshness” angle! Was this really an effective style of advertising?! The scene of the gal smoking is just incredible!!
Video Rating: 5 / 5
I did a search for “ingredients for menthol cigarettes” and the list of ingredients was too long to post here with our 500 character limit!
@gregoryagogo Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised. I think I read a long time ago that some cigarettes contained formaldehyde, a preservative. But what I was referring to was that the woman in the commercial smoked that cigarette as though she was smoking marijuana. She looked pretty high to me. lol!!
There are hundreds of additives in menthol cigarettes…. take your pick!
@gregoryagogo Maybe there’s a little bit more to those cigarettes than meets the eye that causing all that bliss.
Well, for one thing, the radio station I worked at in 1989-’90 [WZGO in Portage, Pa.] once received an “audition cassette” from Stan Sawyer himself (why he sent one to our “peanut-whistle station”, I’ll never know). The moment I heard his voice, I KNEW who it was [he recreated one of his RCA ads as part of his "demo reel"], and I later remembered he did the Salem ads as well. I also know the Salem magazine ads at the time used the exact same ad copy.
How do you know all this very useful information?!!
So gross! What gets me is this gal smoking, like it’s giving her some kind of mental bliss!
Salem became one of the top-seliing menthol brands during this period because they kept stressing theirs was “Springtime Fresh”, and that “Salem Freshens Your Taste”…and they did this right through the mid-’60s…
That’s Stan Sawyer, one of the most familiar voices on TV and radio during the 1950’s and ’60s. He was best known for his RCA commercials [also appearing on camera in several of them] and his Nabisco ads…and, of course, he also “pitched” Salem for R.J. Reynolds in the late ’50s and early ’60s. This is a 1960 ad.