The Health Promotion Department is to request the government to place an immediate ban on the billboard advertising of cigarettes. The ban would have had to come within a couple of years in any case, because this kind of advertising is not permitted in the European Union, though we are allowed a period of grace. The pressure for an immediate ban deserves our support, whether we smoke or don’t smoke, because these billboards are making worse a situation that is already very bad.

One trusts that the government will sit up and listen – though of course, one hopes that the government will not find it necessary to seek to entrench anti-smoking legislation in the Constitution, writing to the Malta Philatelists Association and the flower-arranging and karate clubs for support in doing so.

In the member states of the European Union, different forms of cigarette advertising were banned gradually, until a total ban was reached. But those of us who are over 30 can remember a time when magazines carried almost as many advertisements for cigarettes as they did for cars and perfumes. There was cigarette advertising on television, in the cinema, on radio, in the newspapers, and virtually everywhere you looked.

With sick irony, cigarette companies were among the biggest sponsors of sports events. That was one of the first things to go. The association of health, sport and fitness with something that causes disease and brings about death was finally recognised as intolerable.

When the cigarette manufacturers were left with no mass promotional vehicle other than billboards, in Malta, they went to town with them. They used them for all they were worth, and the situation is getting worse, because they are being used in intensive campaigns and now, even to promote a Rothmans lottery with a Mercedes car as the grand prize. The more packets of Rothmans you buy, the more lottery tickets you get.

And of course, once you buy your packets of cigarettes, you’re not just going to leave them lying around, are you? You’re going to smoke them, or give them to somebody else to smoke. The Health Promotion Department’s concerns about this very thing are perfectly correct. After all, the only reason that Rothmans has conceived this lottery is to get more people to buy more packets of Rothmans.

The Health Promotion Department has come up with a clever way to counteract the Rothmans lottery billboards, which show a picture of the Mercedes prize beneath the large heading ‘Win it’. This other billboard depicts one of Malta’s standard ancient hearses, which look like something from a film set in Cuba (complete with tasteless RIP number-plate) alongside the heading ‘Win it – your last ride’. It will only be effective, though, if the Health Promotion Department is given enough funds to counteract the seemingly bottomless budget of the cigarette manufacturers.

* * *

Billboard advertising for cigarettes, if it is clever rather than a straightforward branding exercise, is extremely effective in creating new smokers, in dissuading existing smokers from stopping their habit, and in making them smoke even more than they do already. This is why it is so dangerous, and why it has to be banned sooner rather than later if the government wishes to be consistent in its health promotion aims.

The cigarette promoters can argue about issues of personal choice and freedom until they’re blue in the face. It is the state, funded by the tax-payer, which foots the bill for the treatment of diseases caused by smoking, and not the cigarette manufacturers. The tax on cigarettes, and the tax on earnings paid by the manufacturers, is nowhere near enough to meet the cost, nor to justify the burden on our limited healthcare resources.

It’s the reason we are forced to wear seat-belts and crash helmets – because if we go through the windscreen or over the handlebars, we become yet another problem for the accident and emergency department to deal with. Yes, adults are free to kill themselves if they so wish, but with years of smoking you don’t just die. First, you become very ill and have to be looked after.

* * *

It is because I work in the publicity and communication business (my other job) that I am able to ‘deconstruct’ cigarette billboard communication and understand how each message works. When I look at these billboards, I don’t see a picture or take them purely at face value. Unlike virtually all other billboards that go up from time to time, the cigarette billboards are perfectly targeted, cleverly conceived, extremely well crafted, and hugely effective. It is precisely because I understand and admire the cleverness of these campaigns that I fear them for what they are achieving.

* * *

Some years ago, a particular brand ran an intensive, highly targeted billboard campaign. It was excellent. I watched the billboards go up and in my mind, I congratulated the creative director, the marketing manager, or whoever was responsible for devising it. Then, because I knew just how effective it was going to be, I prepared for the consequences. Within days of billboards going up all over Paceville and St Julian’s, I was finding packets of this brand hidden round the house.

I had never found packets of any other brand before. My sons were all under 16 at the time; the main source of the hidden packets hadn’t yet turned 14. I spoke to some other parents of boys aged 13 and 14, in what my sons disparagingly refer to as the mothers’ mafia (it pays to be networked, in parenting as with everything else).

Had they recently found any cigarette packets tucked away in bedroom corners, or stuck into bushes in the garden, where they had found none before? Yes, they had. What brand, I wanted to know. Does it make a difference, they asked. Yes, it does. So off they went to check, and came back with the answer I expected. Despite the fact that I was never a smoker, the brand was the first thing I had noticed when I found them. The other parents hadn’t noticed the significance of the brand and had become angry at their sons’ ‘out of the blue’ behaviour.

* * *

This brand may make many protestations to the contrary, but from a professional point of view I could see that this particular billboard campaign of around four years ago was going to be most effective with boys aged 13 to 16. The billboards were concentrated in areas where large numbers of kids that age gather from afternoon to night-time, the design had 100 per cent boy appeal, and then there was the effective emblazoned strap-line, two words which every parent of young teenagers has heard ad nauseam in bitter domestic battles right across the western world. This reflected teenage defiance was what mainly gave the game away, and it worked; it really worked. It worked well enough to overcome all the opposing messages put across by parents (many of whom had stopped smoking habits), by schools, and by health educators. The defiance of those two words was inspired. It was a 15-year-old boy deciding he was suddenly a man who was talking there. This brand’s billboard would not have been effective with girls (too masculine). It would not have been effective with boys beyond the age of 18, when calm waters are largely reached after the horrid turbulence of 16 and 17. It would have left all adults utterly cold. No one my age would have looked at that billboard and said: “Oh, I think I’ll buy a packet of …”. But a 14-year-old would have. And 14-year-olds did.

* * *

Adults are not interesting to cigarette manufacturers in terms of the creation of new markets for cigarettes in general. It is very difficult to persuade anyone over 20 to start smoking, and impossible to persuade anyone over 30 to do so. When it comes to creating new markets for particular brands of cigarettes, the situation changes little. An adult who has been smoking one brand for 20 years is not going to switch to another on a whim, no matter how many billboards he or she is bombarded with, or how many Mercedes cars there is a chance of winning. Brand loyalty is very, very strong with cigarettes. A woman who changes her washing-powder every week, who couldn’t give a damn about the labels on the clothes she wears, will stick to the same brand of cigarettes.

The Rothmans Mercedes campaign will work not by creating new smokers. It is targeted at a higher age cohort than under-16s, to whom a driving licence is still light years away in their minds. It will work by persuading grown-ups who already smoke Rothmans to smoke even more of them, and by encouraging young smokers of around 18 to 20, who are still not brand loyal and for whom the lure of a Mercedes is great, to switch to Rothmans, if only for the duration of the lottery period.

* * *

In Malta, the new market for cigarettes is in one place only: among under 16s. The cigarette manufacturers have to get them young, or they won't get them at all. Banning billboard advertising of cigarettes will not stop young teenagers from smoking – not at all – but it will definitely cut down on the numbers of those who do. Peer pressure is a great influence, but then again, peer pressure is driven partly by advertising and brand image.

Life issues are not just about abortion and conception in a test-tube, remember. They are also about making sure that kids of 13 and 14 are not being targeted by cigarette companies desperate to ensure that they have a sustainable customer-base tomorrow.