DIARY: Rant

I was fascinated to read in the last issue of media that tobacco companies are "in talks to end all forms of mass market communications", including sponsorship and point of sale activities. Well, isn't that big of them? Let us be under no illusion that they're doing this for ethical reasons -they're doing it to pre-empt a ban, and show how efficient they are at self-regulation. In reality, all that will happen is that their massive marketing spends will move to other below-the-line activities. Because tobacco companies' whole existences are about finding new and ever more devious ways to get people to consume a highly dangerous, toxic product. Smoking is one of the biggest preventable causes of death on earth: 60 million people worldwide died from smoking-related diseases between 1950 and 2000; four million a year die prematurely because they smoke - 10 million a year by 2030; half of all smokers are killed by their habit - it wipes an average of 16 years off their lives. Yet marketing this product is still considered acceptable. Which brings us onto the vexed subject of agency ethics. Any agency that complains about restrictions on tobacco marketing is trying to inflate its own profits at the expense of people's health. I'd go further than that - I'd argue that's true of any agency that works for a tobacco client. It's easy for those of us that don't work on tobacco accounts to point the finger at those who do, to be glib about ethics, and to say that no agency should ever work for a client whose business they don't approve of. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be said. The marketing industry is consistently guilty of tortuously persuading itself that nothing it does is really morally objectionable at all. Multinationals that exploit workers, crush local competition and force poor-quality products on consumers are OK because if they didn't do it, someone else would, and if one agency didn't work for them, another would. But this is a product that kills four million people a year, and we shouldn't touch them. Whoever you are, and whatever you want to get off your chest, send your rants to rant@media.com.hk, and we'll print them anonymously.

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