Sunday 28 April 2024

Smoke Rings,

are with us once again, 


photograph Artkraft Strauss Archive, on the 22nd. of this month I made a post about smoking volcano rings, and then today I saw this, smoke rings from a cigarette advertising campaign,

found on Reddit

apparently according to the blurb, and I quote:

"In 1941 a billboard was installed that marked one of the most well knows advertising campaigns in history; Camel cigarettes. This billboard was apart of Times Square’s history for 26 long years. The billboard displayed a man blowing smoke toward his audience with “Camel” gleaming in bright lights, for two and a half decades the Camel Cigarette was advertised with two novel billboards that were so clever they easily caught the attention of the passing public. Known as spectaculars, these billboards blew the illusion of a giant smoke ring every four seconds. Steam from a piston-driven diaphragm was forced out of a hole, and this mimicked a person smoking. The spectacular most often photographed was located in New York City's Times Square at 44th Street and Broadway. Some consider this Camel billboard the most famous of all outdoor advertising signs", 

what a neat way to draw attention to your product, as it happens Camel were the cigarettes of my choice when I was on 3 - 4 packs a day, before having a bet with Alf, Hi Alf, that I could not give up smoking for 1 year, the loser to donate the winnings to MERCY Pattaya, a charity for street kids, I stopped there and then, after a year of not smoking Alf honoured his bet, and gave the charity 10,000 baht as agreed, 

the charity was chosen after the death of Steve Blumenthal, whose favorite the MERCY charity was, as it happens I made a couple of posts about Steve, here and here, in the years that followed a total of over 200,000 baht was donated to the charity by friends of Steve and the TQ2 crowd.



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