Eight years after the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company was first challenged for targeting minors in its Joe Camel ad campaign, 80,000 pages of once-confidential documents, including details of the tobacco company's youth marketing strategies, have been placed online by UC San Francisco.
The Mangini Collection of documents chronicle the company's struggle to hold on to market share as tobacco use in the U.S. declined. Internally generated marketing strategies are shown to converge on the view that the older generation of smokers is dying off, so the tobacco company's future success rests on its ability to attract young, first time smokers.
Online publication of the mostly confidential documents stems from a December, 1997 legal settlement of a case brought by Janet Mangini that forced R.J. Reynolds (RJR) to abandon the Joe Camel campaign.
The documents form part of the online Tobacco Control Archives compiled and released by the UCSF Library/Center for Knowledge Management. The internet address to access the collection is the following: www.library.ucsf.edu/tobacco/mangini.
The Joe Camel campaign was designed to attract what are referred to by RJR as FUBYAS, first time usual brand young adult smokers. The traditional "I'd Walk A Mile" campaign with the image of the solitary middle aged male was replaced with the irrepressibly cool, pool-playing, baseball-capped camel.
Much of the documents defend or attack an article published in a 1991 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (vol. 266, no. 22) claiming that Joe Camel had a higher rate of recognition among schoolchildren than Mickey Mouse. The documents reflect Reynolds effort to refute these findings by sponsoring many academic studies which counter this conclusion.
Also included are documents on the Tobacco Institute's "Helping Youth Decide" program, promoted by R.J. Reynolds and designed to recruit educators, youth group leaders and law enforcement officials to use this tobacco industry "anti-smoking" curriculum. The documents indicate that the primary purpose of this effort was political, to head off meaningful anti-tobacco education by pro-health forces.
The first 2,000 pages of the Mangini Collection were released online by UCSF a year ago, but the current collection contains some 40 times more pages of documents. They form part of the Tobacco Control Archives, established in 1994 to provide a centralized source of information about the grass-roots tobacco control movement in California, the people and organizations involved, and the resulting legislation generated. A central focus of the archive has been the documentation of Proposition 99, the tobacco tax initiative passed by voters in 1989.
The UCSF Library/Center for Knowledge Management has received a $500,000 grant from the UC Tobacco Related Disease Research Program to continue to abstract and digitize tobacco industry documents for release on the internet.