Omni was a science-fiction magazine, published between 1978 and 1997. I found a collection of Omni magazines dating between 1980-89 in an Oxfam bookshop in Folkestone earlier this year. Immediately drawn to the retro design and the yesteryear discussions of Y2K and the new millennia, I also discovered that the adverts were almost all worth examining when I started flipping through the mags. In this case, the time frame of the issues I picked up has allowed me to see a spectrum of adverts from the same company - Winston cigarettes.
You’ve heard of the Marlboro Man. Have you ever heard of the Winston Man, this bloke who always seems to be abseiling?
The R.J. Reynolds Tobacco company was formed in 1875 and is still one of the largest tobacco companies in the US. The son of a tobacco farmer, Richard Joshua Reynolds moved to Winston (now Winston-Salem), North Carolina, and started his own tobacco manufacturing company. He quickly established himself ahead of his peers by revolutionising tobacco consumption - notably as an early promoter of the pre-packaged cigarette, which proved to be a very lucrative decision. By using Turkish tobacco and creating a more palatable flavour, Reynolds launched Camel cigarettes in 1913 to great success.
Winston cigarettes came much later, launching in 1954, long after Reynolds had died in 1918. Like Camel, it was launched with snappy advertising campaigns and ubiquitous marketing. By the mid-1960s, it was one of the best-selling cigarette brands. The famously grammatically incorrect slogan “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should” used between the 1950s and the 1970s became a jingle and was frequently parodied. Winston also sponsored sporting events from NASCAR to the 1982 World Cup. They even sponsored The Flintstones. There was seemingly no escaping the pervasiveness of Winston cigarettes.
When I first saw these ads, I was immediately reminded of the Marlboro Man - the character devised in the 1950s to boost sales of Marlboro cigarettes, who embodied aspirational masculine physicality via the medium of cowboys. These adverts feel like a new-age industrialised version of that - a man who can fly a helicopter, work construction, participate in search and rescue. Judging by these ads, all of this seems to require so much abseiling - an activity that, to my knowledge, should never be done with a cigarette in hand (admittedly I am basing this on the one terrifying time I have abseiled, so I am happy to be corrected). David Goerlitz was one of the men who featured heavily as a Winston Man, appearing in over 40 advertisements. In a strikingly similar move to the Marlboro Man models, Goerlitz has since been very outspoken about the damage smoking does to public health.
These adverts are part of the “Search and Rescue” advertising campaign. Tobacco advertising on TV and radio had been banned in 1971, so the money was pushed to print media. Goerlitz was 29 when he first became a model for Winston, appearing in advertising campaigns from 1981-88. He has publicly stated that he “and other young men hanging out of helicopters and off the edge of cliffs, looking rugged and healthy under blue skies” were selected to appeal to men aged 18-341. Previously a heavy smoker, he publicly stopped when his brother was diagnosed with cancer and devoted his platform to anti-smoking education, making appearances in documentaries, on television and in schools. David Goerlitz may have become influential through these advertisements, but watching videos of his public speaking, he attacks the very things that made him well-known: the adverts aimed at young people, and brands eager to spawn a new generation of smokers.