Tobacco Clients Give Up Ads In AGs' Deal

By Nora FitzGerald





WASHINGTON, D.C.–Forty state attorneys general have fashioned a comprehensive settlement with Big Tobacco that includes the most sweeping limits on advertising in its history.





After two months of negotiations, cigarette manufacturers agreed to ban all outdoor ads, the use of all color images such as the Marlboro Man and Joe Camel, and implement anti-smoking announcements. The cigarette makers also agreed to create a $300-billion fund to compensate disease victims in exchange for some legal immunity from future claims.





‘Tobacco companies will stop marketing and advertising to our children,’ Grant Wood, attorney general of Arizona, said Friday.





‘The concept here is that if enough AGs band together when they don’t like an advertising practice, like liquor advertising, they can create a settlement that no court would uphold,’ said Doug Wood, executive partner of Hall Dickler Kent Friedman & Wood, an advertising law firm in New York.





Tobacco companies spent about $658 million last...