Advertising campaigns
In the 1970s, Silk Cut was advertised in several popular cinema advertisements, including a parody of the defence of Rorke's Drift, as portrayed in the film Zulu, and of British POWs escaping from a German prison camp.
The brand was also made popular by a surrealistic advertising campaign launched in 1984, in preparation for a ban on named tobacco advertising.[5] By using the typical colours of the brand, the first surrealistic advertisement of Silk Cut showed a purple silk cloth with a single cut running through it, showing behind it a white background. The name of the cigarette brand never appears on this advertisement, nor are any other objects linked to smoking visible, such as packs of cigarettes or smoke. The only hint for the viewer that this advertisement concerns a cigarette brand at all is the mandatory health warning at the bottom.[6] Based on a series of works by avantgardist artist Lucio Fontana, this first advertisement represented a wordplay on the brand name Silk Cut.[7] This kind of understated advertisement brought together art and life and was unprecedented except for a similar, but not as daring, Benson & Hedges campaign in the 1970s.
The campaign went on to be a huge success, making Silk Cut the best-selling brand at the beginning of the 1990s.[8] Silk Cut went on to produce many more advertisements in this style, playing with surrealistic themes and pop cultural references, like Man Ray's "Cadeau" as well as Alfred Hitchcock's famous shower curtain scene from the movie Psycho (1960). In later parts of the campaign they also created original surrealistic themes for the ads.
The main idea behind the use of surrealism for an advertising campaign was to catch the attention of the viewer by giving him or her a riddle to solve, i.e. guessing what product or brand was actually advertised. Only those who could link the images would eventually come to the conclusion that this is an advertisement for the cigarette brand Silk Cut. This worked as a rewarding sensation for the viewer, attaching positive emotions (for successfully solving the riddle) with the brand. But it was also possible to interpret darker and sexual themes into the images of the campaign, even though this was most likely not intended.[9]
After a running time of almost two decades, the final poster in the series was in 2002 when all tobacco advertising in the UK was finally banned and showed an opera singer, wearing a purple silk dress which had split at the seams - a reference to the saying 'It's not over until the fat lady sings'.[10][11]
However, sales of Silk Cut cigarettes continued to grow even after the campaign had ended, thanks to sport sponsorship and to many special edition packs, as well as changes on the pack shape, texture, style of opening, cellophane, foil and inner frame. The market share grew 1.1% from 2004 to 2008, and a further 2.9% from 2008 to 2011.[12]
