What happens when your 6-year-old asks you to look up camels?

I just received the following disturbing email from my friend and colleague, Sarah Mart, research director at Alcohol Justice. It seems that while Joe Camel may be gone, his spirit lives on.

So this weekend, my 6 y.o. daughter wanted to learn more about camels. This is out of the blue, and I am not a camel expert by any means. She asked me as I was checking email on the laptop: “Mama, will you look up some information about the camels and their different numbers of humps?”

Sure, sweetie. I type in “camel” into the address line, which is an automatic google search using the words I type there. I hit return, and a google search list shows up.

#1 at the top of the list:  www.camel.com, courtesy of R.J. Reynolds.

I made my way to nationalgeographic.com and did another search there, so we could get some info on actual animals.

This morning, I went to www.camel.com. The address changes to tobaccopleasure.com while taking you to the age-gate page. In case you wondered, it’s Camel’s “humptennial” 99th birthday this year.

One Response to “What happens when your 6-year-old asks you to look up camels?”

  1. Amy says:

    Wow. Just wow. I worked with the American Cancer Society in the late 1980s through the 1990s and lived through the “more 6-year-olds can recognize Joe Camel than Mickey Mouse” days. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1956101)

    I guess I was naive to think the tobacco companies would go quietly into the night when it came to marketing to youth…

Leave a Reply

 

Archives

  • 2016 (4)
  • 2015 (20)
  • 2014 (41)
  • 2013 (67)
  • 2012 (70)
  • 2011 (53)
  • 2010 (49)