My friend, the Advertising Council

The Advertising Council, a trade organization that coordinates the production of public service announcements which are created pro bono by advertising agencies around the United States, has its own MySpace page.

Fascinating, but I'm not sure I want to be its friend.

Who's a Smooth Canadian?

There's a fascinating article in this weekend's New York Times book reviews by Paul Collins. It's called "Smoke This Book," and it's making me want to have a cigarette... but I digress.

Cigarette ads used to be common in paperback books. And not just cigarette ads, but ads for other products. Collins tells us:

The story of paperback advertising started innocently enough: with babies, in fact. In 1958, the Madison Avenue adman Roy Benjamin founded the Quality Book Group, a consortium of the paperback industry heavyweights Bantam Books, Pocket Books and the New American Library. Despite the lofty name, the group’s real purpose was to sell advertisements in paperbacks, and its first target was the biggest success of them all: Dr. Benjamin Spock’s “Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care.” A 1959 Pocket Books print run of 500,000 included advertisements by Q-Tips, Carnation and Procter & Gamble. By 1963, a 26-page insert in Spock was commanding $6,500 to $7,500 per page, and ads were spreading into mysteries and other pulps as well.

Just when I thought I was getting used to the fact that cigarette advertising is still permitted in America, I hear something new. In Canada, it was banned in most forms of media more than twenty years ago, and today tobaccco companies aren't even allowed to sponsor events. No advertising of tobacco products is permitted at all.