Tobacco company scales back disputed ads

WASHINGTON – Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. has scaled back a marketing campaign featuring hip-hop characters that critics said was aimed at black youths and violated a legal settlement between the industry and 46 states.

Brown & Williamson attorney Neil Mellen said in a recent letter to Maine Attorney General Steven Rowe, who is in charge of enforcing the 1998 agreement with tobacco companies, that the company no longer is packaging Kool cigarettes using images of youthful rappers, disc jockeys and dancers to sell them.

The April 16 letter, obtained Friday by The Associated Press, said the Louisville, Ky.-based company stopped distributing those cigarettes March 30 shortly after receiving a complaint from Rowe.

Rowe told the company to halt the ad campaign, saying the advertisements, retail displays and packaging “appear to be targeted to youth, and particularly African-American youth.” Under terms of the legal settlement, tobacco companies are barred from targeting teens through advertising or marketing.

Mellen said the company also has stopped giving away CD-ROMs or running magazine ads that were part of a special campaign for Kool cigarettes.

Company spokesman Mark Smith confirmed Friday that Brown & Williamson had taken those steps but said the company was acting on its own timeline, not because of Rowe’s letter.

In his letter, Mellen wrote that “there is no basis for a blanket demand that Brown & Williamson discontinue” the campaign in its entirety.

The campaign is focused around a national disc jockey competition that Brown & Williamson sponsors.