A cigarette brand sneaked past our anti-smoking laws for a puff at the Singapore Grand Prix

By Les Tan

To get past bans on tobacco advertising, Ferrari came up with another…logo. They must think we’re stupid or something.

Most eyes were on the two Ferrari cars at the recent Singapore Grand Prix. Their distinctive all-red colour scheme stood out on the grid of 20 cars. In the course of the three days, the peddlers of the death weed at Philip Morris have managed to get their brand Marlboro before the eyes of over one million viewers in Singapore for the first time since 1970.

In place of the cigarette brand logo, the Ferrari cars now sport a white and red barcode. This subliminal advertising is insidious because over time, people will just come to associate the barcode with the cigarette brand, circumventing the advertising ban. While the barcode logo may not contravene the letter of the law in Singapore, it certainly does the spirit of it.

Some may say writing about it highlights the brand and it is better to leave it alone. However, anyone with a drop of curiosity will ask what that barcode is and the answer is soon found on the internet.

We have a lot of firsts in Singapore. One was to be the first country in the world to ban tobacco advertising in 1971. Foreign critics said we were “draconian”. In contrast, Malaysia did not ban tobacco advertising until 1995 but still allowed the cigarette companies to come up with spurious sponsorship vehicles like travel tours, clothing, cybercafes. The Malaysians even took sponsorship money from cigarette companies when they hosted the Commonwealth Games in 1998.

Ferrari is the only F1 team that still has a tobacco sponsor. Philip Morris reportedly pays Ferrari US$1 billion in an agreement that runs out in 2011. Ferrari have said that the traditional cigarette branding would no longer appear on their cars and they will stick with the barcode logo.

“Tobacco is a defective product. It kills half of its customers,” said Douglas Bettcher, head of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Tobacco Free Initiative. “It kills 5.4 million people per year, and half of those deaths are in developing countries. That’s like one jumbo jet going down every hour.”

The WHO have naturally advocated that advertising of tobacco should not be allowed. The 168 countries that agreed to the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which came into effect on 27 February 2005, agreed to ban tobacco advertising.

Singapore banned smoking in hawker centres, coffee-shops, cafes and fast-food outlets beginning July 1st, 2006. The ban was extended to bus interchanges and shelters, public toilets and public swimming complexes. On July 1st, 2007, smoking was banned in entertainment nightspots.

From next year, January 1st, 2009, the ban will extend to children’s playgrounds, exercise areas, markets, underground and multi-storey carparks, ferry terminals and jetties. It will also be extended to non-air conditioned areas in offices, factories, shops, shopping complexes and lift lobbies. Essentially, no smoking is allowed wherever there is a potential for another human being to breathe second hand smoke.

Tobacco companies like Philip Morris have sought to circumvent restrictions on their business by actively sponsoring sports globally.

Said Dr. Shigeru Omi, WHO Regional Director for the Western Pacific: “Tobacco companies sponsor sports and entertainment events, hand out branded items and advertise at point of sales to attract young people. Girls and young female adults are specially targeted. The rise in tobacco use in this group, the tobacco industry’s special focus, is a challenge that has to be dealt with urgently.”

This change to a barcode logo in place of their traditional one is one of many devious manipulations by Philip Morris and other tobacco companies to wriggle through every loophole they can find in the law. Replacing their logo with another one is just the same poison in a different wrapper.

Did they not think we’d notice?