Another Word From Our Former Sponsors

As we continue to look back on our years at Vanderbilt, sometimes the change from those days to now can be quite striking.

And some of that change began while we were still on campus....

The commercial below was something you saw everday on TV back in the late 1960s and the very early 1970s. But cigarette ads were banned from the airways while we were in school at Vanderbilt.

In April,1970 Congress passed the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act which banned both TV and radio ads for cigarettes as of January 2, 1971.

It is interesting how so many of the cigarette ad concepts from those days ("The Marlboro Man", "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should", "Outstanding, and they are mild") continue to live in our pop culture even today.

But this ad for the "extra long" Benson & Hedges cigarettes (with its catchy jingle) was already on its way to being a thing of the past when it aired on the Evening News on July 21, 1969....




Once again, we thank the Vanderbilt New Archives for making these TV ads and news clips available. By the way, if you are wondering, the last national TV ad for a cigarette was for the Virginia Slims brand. It aired at 11:59 PM on January 1, 1970 during a network break for THE TONIGHT SHOW on NBC.