Here in America, there’s this rugged hero going up on billboards, which perfectly symbolized capitalist masculine Western imagery. He emerged during the height of the Cold War as we’re battling the communists, who we Americans viewed at these monolithic “mass men” who all think and act the same.
The Marlboro Man would also come to mean different things to different people, and without ever really changing, he would be a reflection - or a repudiation - of the times. He truly spoke to that American idea of rugged individualism. He’s the lone individualist riding the range - he’s at one with nature as he’s wrangling the cows.
There’s multiple meanings behind the cowboy: There’s the cowboy who’s a redneck, you know, the beer-drinking, pickup-driving urban cowboy of John Travolta fame, but then there’s the mythic cowboy, that masculine icon. Vacker: They were trying to create the ideal man, and there’s no bigger icon in America than the cowboy. The ads also harken back to a more pastoral time, where everyone isn’t punching time clocks and lining up to catch the M train with their gray flannel suits and going to work in an office. He may work for somebody else, but he’s his own man and he’s in control of his life, an independent person.
MARLBORO MAN HOW TO
He’s the guy who knows how to do things and gets them done without any fuss. He’s obviously a respected guy - the quiet man. They had top photographers and top cinematographers, and they created this powerful imagery that appealed to something that ran deeper in the American consciousness.Įllsworth: Class-wise, the Marlboro Man is kind of like a foreman - he’s the head of the cowboys who’s directing them to do the work.
MARLBORO MAN SERIES
Jim Carrier, journalist and author of the Denver Post series “In Search of the Marlboro Man” (and author of an upcoming book by the same title): They eventually found a set of models that were beautiful-looking men. That, of course, fit American society in the 1950s and 1960s, where Westerns were all over television with shows like Gunsmoke and Maverick and American kids were playing cowboys and Indians. So they decided to drop all the other tattoo guys and just go with the cowboy thing. Scott Ellsworth, former historian at the Smithsonian Institution and co-author of the Marlboro Oral History and Documentation Project : Eventually, someone at Leo Burnett noticed that whenever they showed a cowboy, there was a little rise in sales. The ads pretty much stayed the same all the way after that. But in the early 1960s, they switched back to the cowboy and that’s when it really hit home. Then they migrated to various images of masculinity, including various sports figures, like players for the Green Bay Packers and stuff like that. To overcome the idea that a filter was for a woman, the Leo Burnett advertising agency decided to attack that stigma head-on, creating a campaign where the manliest of manly dudes would be depicted smoking a Marlboro. Later on, as cigarettes began to be sold with filters - Marlboros included - filtered cigarettes were also seen as feminine, which further caused men to shy away from the brand.īut after faltering for decades as a lady’s smoke - including trying gimmicks like dying the tips of their cigarettes red - in the 1950s, the Philip Morris Company (which owns Marlboro) decided to direct their product toward men.
Decades before the rugged Marlboro Man image was born, Marlboros were a cigarette aimed at women, with their ad campaign focused around high-class ladies elegantly smoking, alongside assurances that Marlboros wouldn’t interfere with a woman’s lipstick. That was the original advertising slogan for Marlboro cigarettes when they first hit the market in the 1920s.
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