Britain’s biggest tobacco firm and one of its major rivals are under fire for signing multimillion-pound sponsorship deals with Formula One teams that health campaigners claim are being used to promote their next generation of products – such as e-cigarettes and heated tobacco – which they are banned from advertising.
British American Tobacco, which sponsors the McLaren team, and Marlboro manufacturer Philip Morris International (PMI), which has signed a deal with Ferrari worth an estimated £100m a year, are accused of using the partnerships to promote what they respectively describe as “reduced risk products” and “less harmful alternatives to cigarettes”.
Ferrari cars promote PMI’s “Mission Winnow” initiative, which, according to its website, aims to find “new scientific solutions” that will “transform not only our company but an entire industry for the 1.1 billion people who smoke and those around them”. Some have claimed that the M in the branding is subtle plug for Marlboro, a claim categorically rejected by PMI ,which in 2010 was forced to remove all of its barcode logos on Ferrari cars after being accused of using subliminal advertising for Marlboro cigarettes.
McLaren cars carry BAT’s “A better tomorrow” slogan, which the F1 team says on its website is “centred on accelerating BAT’s transforming agenda, leveraging its portfolio of potentially reduced-risk products, aiming to deliver the world’s tobacco and nicotine consumers a better tomorrow”.
Phil Chamberlain, managing editor of Tobacco Tactics, part of the Tobacco Research Control Group at the University of Bath, said: “They’re trying to associate the new technology in cars and innovation with their move into e-cigarettes and making out that’s new technology. We see it as another front being opened up in the way tobacco companies are looking to legitimise their products and get out to as many audiences as possible.”
Deborah Arnott, chief executive of health charity Action on Smoking and Health (Ash), said: “For many years ‘Big Tobacco’ sponsored F1 so it could plaster its brands all over the sport. Such advertising, promotion and sponsorship is no longer legal, whether the brands are tobacco products or e-cigarettes. Instead, it has got back into sponsorship to attempt a corporate makeover from a business pariah whose products cause death and disease, to a socially responsible, hi-tech industry at the cutting edge of innovation. But make no mistake, Big Tobacco’s vast profits still come from its lethal products. Tobacco kills around 7 million people a year, and 80% of the world’s 1.1 billion smokers live in poor countries, where the burden of tobacco-related illness and death is heaviest, far from the glamour of Formula One.”
The links between the tobacco giants and F1 are long established. Senior PMI board members have even been on the board of Ferrari, and vice versa. But a blanket ban on tobacco companies advertising their brands on the cars has made sustaining this relationship more difficult.
The two firms had to remove their slogans from the cars for the Melbourne grand prix in March amid investigations by Australian health officials into whether they were in breach of advertising bans. However, PMI pledged that the branding will be on display for future races, starting with the Spanish grand prix in Barcelona this weekend. Its actions are likely to invite acute scrutiny from health campaigners and officials around the world.
“The fact that a complaint was made in Australia and they withdrew it suggests that this is a grey area,” Chamberlain said. The decision by the two companies to restore the branding comes after the EU’s Health, Food Safety and Energy Union department announced it was to investigate sponsorship deals between tobacco companies and F1 teams.
A spokesman for PMI said: “We have been clear that Mission Winnow does not and will not advertise or promote any PMI-branded tobacco or e-cigarette products.”
Simon Cleverly, group head of corporate affairs at BAT, said: “Many public health bodies around the world recognise the potential reduced-risk nature of e-cigarettes and the role they can play in helping smokers to quit and it therefore seems counter-intuitive that there is pressure to limit awareness of these products in a way that could potentially be detrimental to millions of smokers around the world.”