Think that's weird? Try and figure out who's running thetruth.com.

You've seen their ads,they're that anti-smoking campaign whose ads are so obnoxious most studies have shown that at best they do nothing to prevent kids from smoking and at worse make children much likely too smoke in response to their oppressive and condescending tone.

Back in 1998 tobacco companies signed the Master Settlement Agreement in which they agreed to no longer deliberately market to children, since that was a thing they were doing- marketing to children, even in 1998. This suit resulted in 206 billion dollars worth of funding for the next 25 years for anti-smoking campaigns like the above mentioned.

In 1969 President Nixon signs into law a bill which bans the advertising of cigarettes on television in an effort to prevent their being advertised to children. Since then almost no children were exposed to ads about cigarettes on TV until...

In 1998 when ads by the Truth campaign, an advertising company which gains the entirety of it's funding from the four major tobacco companies, an organization which answers to no one, has no public oversight, does not disclose the names of it's organizers, airs continually during the peek hours when children watch television.

In a lot of ways that bill from 1969 banning the adverting of tobacco on television was a win for tobacco companies. In fact $200 million a year was being spent on radio and television alone by tobacco in 1967, and it wasn't just because they were looking for new customers, they were actually advertising to keep the customers they already had and not loose them to their competitors.

With tobacco advertising banned from TV they were no longer tied up in the multi-million dollar adverting arms races and cigarette companies were no longer bleeding money in advertising just to stay where they already were.

Now they just needed a new way to market to kids.

- /u/Samslate from Reddit

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