If you are in the mood for some new sort of collecting, you may want to try starting a collection of smoking ads. Smoking advertisements have been with us for a very long time, and have changed quite a bit over the years. Ads for smoking come in all sizes and certainly carry all sorts of slogans and themes that you may find interesting and worth preserving.

Over the years, advertisers have tried just about every approach to sell tobacco than one can imagine. At one time, celebrity endorsements were all the rage. Classic smoking ads would have glamorous stars of stage and screen extolling the virtues of one brand or another, touting its ability to sweeten breath or to ease tension headaches. These would definitely be seen as pro smoking ads, as they went out of their way to promote cigarettes as being good for you.

Later ads tended to rely more on an image and less on the health benefits of smoking. These types of smoking advertisements set the stage by showing the great outdoors, such as a canyon or prairie, with a man on horseback enjoying his cigarette. In other ads, a well-dressed woman makes a splash at a party while smoking her favorite brand. The idea behind these smoking advertisements was to draw a certain type of person to their product, or at least draw those that wanted to be associated with that sort of image.

Of course, advertising smoking was not always about getting people to smoke. There is a wealth of quit smoking ads that can be collected. Some of these stop smoking ads had an element of fun associated with them. The more funny quite smoking ads might feature a popular comedian or even a cartoon character. TV ads to quit smoking were often mirrored in the print media, allowing for a hard copy record in the days before home computers put the world at our fingertips. Some no smoking ads were geared toward young people, since the question “does advertising encourage teens to smoke” was understood then and now to be answered in the affirmative by many people. A counter campaign of non-smoking ads was thought to minimize the impact of the pro smoking ads on younger and more impressionable minds.

Smoking advertisements came in black and white editions as well as full color editions. Some of them were true works of art, as were many of the no smoke ad treatments as well. Why not look into collecting some of these pro smoking ads as well as some of those fund effects of smoking ads? You may find your collection is the talk of your social circle.