Everyone should find this Altria ad offensive. Altria may believe that marketing can make an evil move seem benevolent. It makes it worse.
Altria is moving beyond poison, oops, I mean tobacco
The ad from the tobacco company says the following.
Altria is moving in a new direction. From being known as a tobacco company to being recognized as a tobacco harm reduction company. Moving beyond smoking.
I had to rewind the short 15-second ad many times. This type of as is how these corporations that have often done the immoral thing get away with maintaining some semblance of goodwill. I have seen this ad play often, repeatedly on the networks. These guys know that one starts to accept and change their views when they attach some sort of normalcy.
Altria wants you to believe that it is a benevolent entity. After all, many got sick and died from buying their product. But they are a good company. So those weak people who used their products out of their free will now work towards healing them.
Interestingly, a part of this cycle rarely gets interpreted as it should. The tobacco company provides the raw material for their new business, YOU. In other words, they get you sick as they addict you to their products. And then they offer you a way to fix your illness. You pay them to get you sick. And you pay them to attempt to get you well without any guarantee of success. That is a hell of a lucrative business model.
I don’t want to pile on, on Altria. Remember BPs “Beyond Petroleum” campaign. It follows the same pattern. We should raise red flags whenever our health is one of the cogs in a corporation’s profitability model. For that reason, we should have never relegated healthcare to for-profit corporations. It is why we must bill all companies for the carnage they leave behind and change our healthcare system to Medicare For All.
