"It's Toasted"

I have recently started watching Madmen, an AMC series that "follows the lives of the ruthlessly competitive men and women of Madison Avenue advertising ...." I was struck by an scene early in the first season where lead character Don Draper meets with executives of Lucky Strike cigarettes. Discouraged by the recent exposure of the "health risks" of smoking, the company must try a different approach to advertising. Their ads featuring physicians claiming that Lucky Strike are less irritating must be replaced. After a few minutes of brainstorming, Don comes up with the phrase "it's toasted." A few weeks before seeing this episode, I came across an exhibit curated by the Stanford School of Medicine and on display in the New York Public Library through the end of December. Not a Cough in a Carload: Images from the Tobacco Industry Campaign to Hide the Hazards of Smoking tells "the story of how [principally through advertising images] between the late 1920s and the early 1950s, tobacco companies used deceptive and often patently false claims in an effort to reassure the public of the safety of their products." The ads in this exhibit illustrate social norms and gender roles of the early to mid 20th century. Check out the exhibit at http://lane.stanford.edu/tobacco/index.html.