George Washington Hill, president of the American Tobacco Company, had a problem worth about half his potential market. Women were smoking more at home, but smoking in public was taboo — in some cities it was an arrestable offense, and everywhere it was read as a sign of low character.
He hired Edward Bernays, who consulted the psychoanalyst A. A. Brill. Brill's advice, in the Freudian idiom of the period, was that cigarettes were torches of freedom and that women who smoked were claiming male power.
Bernays did not write an advertisement.
He contacted Ruth Hale, a feminist and journalist, and asked her to send a telegram to prominent young women inviting them to march in the New York Easter Parade on 30 March 1929 lighting cigarettes as a protest against a taboo. He recruited around ten debutantes through her, briefed them on when and where to light up, and — critically — arranged for photographers to be positioned in advance and for the story to be offered to newspapers as a news event.
It ran across the country. The taboo did not vanish overnight, but the frame did the work over the following years.
Two things about this are worth separating.
The first is symbol substitution. Nothing in the campaign says anything about cigarettes. It attaches the product to a live identity drive — women's autonomy in the year after the vote — so that the purchase becomes an act of self-definition rather than consumption. Attacking the product then feels like attacking the cause.
The second is the form of delivery, and it is the more general innovation. Daniel Boorstin later named this a pseudo-event: an occurrence staged for the purpose of being reported, whose reality consists in its coverage. A pseudo-event borrows the credibility of journalism. The reader is not evaluating an advertisement, with all the discounting that advertising receives; they are reading news about what other women did, which is the social proof of chapter 8 delivered through a channel that appears independent.
Bernays understood exactly what he had done. He described the campaign in his own writing as an example of how the group leader can be used to reach the group, and he was proud of it.
He also, decades later, campaigned against smoking, and said he would not have taken the account had he known. His wife smoked; he used to take her cigarettes and break them.
Cross-ref: Attack — Control the Frame