¡Jeff!
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Jeff the Diseased Lung: the new face of Marlboro, with Jon Oliver and the Internet's help.
John Oliver and the team behind Last Week Tonight have gotten a lot of praise for tackling in-depth topics that other shows can't, particularly shows that have to be made on (cough, cough) a daily basis.
This past Sunday, Last Week Tonight took on a target whose cartoon-evilness we can all agree on: Big Tobacco. By itself, that's not news—even Philip Morris' press statement responding to the episode acknowledges that dealing death makes them an easy target. What is news is that the episode actually made waves in the real world (or at least the Internet) by creating a new mascot for Marlboro: Jeff the Diseased Lung.
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Jeff is actually in all three pictures, hidden inside cowboys' torsos.
As of today, if you Google 'Marlboro Mascot,' guess who comes up? Jeff. You can help put Jeff at the top of Google's results for Marlboro by downloading the image and then posting it yourself to Google Plus, tagging it with #Marlboro and #JeffWeCan. You can also join in the #JeffWeCan hashtag on Twitter.
Tiny, intimidated Marlboro Countries.
The 18-minute segment, which you should totally watch, focuses on Philip Morris International's practice of harassing small governments that try to pass public health laws limiting how cigarettes can be marketed. Even though the Marlboro Man and Joe Camel are long dead in the United States, companies like Philip Morris are determined to fight off any restrictions on their carefully-branded images in smaller economies, where cigarettes are booming (especially with kids). While anti-cigarette marketing laws succeed in rich countries like America and Australia, the mere threat of an expensive lawsuit can keep poor countries obedient.
As compromised as a smoker's immune system.
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The packaging Australia uses, because they're rich enough to fight off PMI lawsuits.
Oliver wanted to find a middle ground between governments' desire to expose consumers to realistic images of what will happen if they smoke, and tobacco companies' desire to have fun branded images that make smoking look youthful and exciting. So, Oliver and company created Jeff the Diseased Lung, an anthropomorphic, emphysemic cowboy lung that kids love and which HBO's lawyers will not protect in any way.
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Jeff is a big hit in Togo, where Marlboro sponsors loosie kiosks outside schools.
To help roll out the new mascot to smokers anywhere, Last Week Tonight handed out t-shirts in Togo and put up billboards in Uruguay, two countries Philip Morris has been trying to bully out of public health laws on cigarette marketing.
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This is also aimed at replacing Marlboro's repugnant "Don't Be A Maybe" campaign, which is designed to recapture the kinds of young adults who used to identify with the Marlboro Man. (Warning: this marketing/branding strategy video is far more disgusting than any cancerous lung.)
Without that cancerous cowboy, those 15-30 year-olds have no way of knowing that not smoking Marlboros is the reason they haven't achieved maximum coolness and independence in life. Now, fortunately, they have Jeff.
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