This was just e-mailed to me, and I can’t believe I didn’t think to look for it online: my favourite cigarette ad campaign ever, Camel’s “More Doctors Smoke Camels!” campaign. I first heard this on an old tape of Abbott and Costello radio shows from the ’40s, and this is the TV version. It is essentially the same as the radio version — same slogan, probably even the same announcer — except that it ends with a shot of a woman who is either not a doctor or the most elegantly-dressed medical professional in the world. Because one of the early rules of TV advertising was to get a hot woman into the commercial, no matter what the product was.

You have to admire the incredible jiu-jitsu technique involved: promoting a product whose biggest flaw is being bad for your health (even before the smoking-cancer link was discovered, it was accepted that cigarettes, like alcohol, were not particularly good for you) by claiming that health professionals love it.