Last gasp: the best minds in advertising launch their cigarette campaigns to end all campaigns

To some they are works of great and lucrative art. To others, the Marlboro man, Benson & Hedges' pyramids and the ripped fabric of Silk Cut are the worst form of propaganda, luring a fresh generation of impressionable youngsters to premature death and debilitating diseases.

At the stroke of midnight on Thursday, cigarette advertising on billboards and in newspapers and magazines will be stubbed out for the last time.

But for the advertising industry, which has reaped huge rewards on the back of decades of cigarette campaigns, the next six days will be the last chance to prove its artistic and commercial prowess. The tobacco empires are refusing to bow out quietly. Unrepentant at the health effects on generations of smokers, millions of pounds are being spent before the axe falls in a defiant blizzard of publicity.

Gallaher Group, the cigarette manufacturer, is spending an estimated £2.5m on a final trio of striking adverts to promote Silk Cut. Two are already in the press. Another, featuring a politician whose purple rosette faces the chop from a gardener's shears, will be seen tomorrow.

Another £2.5m is being dedicated to promoting a completely new Benson & Hedges brand, B&H Silver, which will be launched later in the month, when advertising will be impossible. And more than £1m is being spent on promoting the happiness of smoking a cigar called Hamlet. This follows a "viral" campaign of mini-ads e-mailed to smokers' computers nationwide. The final advert will be revealed in a press campaign on Thursday.

At Gallahers' arch-rival Imperial, the publicity machine is also in full flight. Its final PG Wodehouse-inspired Lambert & Butler campaign, features the sharp-witted Butler telling his dullard employer Lambert: "Looks like we've been outlawed, sir." Both are pixellated as if fading to oblivion. Just so that no one misses the point, a strapline explains: "All cigarette advertising banned from 14 February, 2003."

The Tobacco Advertising and Promotion Act became law last December, exactly two years later than originally planned. It brought printed adverts into line with television where cigarette promotion was banned 38 years ago.

The tobacco companies successfully delayed its introduction by raising a series of technical objections and overturning a European Union directive, since replaced with a weaker version. After the first part of the Act takes effect in Britain, it will be followed on 14 May by a ban on direct mail and promotions involving money-off coupons.

Tobacco sponsorship of sports will be the next to go with a deadline of the end of July. Global sports which are highly dependent on tobacco funding will have an extra three years' grace until July 2005 to find alternative sponsors. This will affect the World Snooker championship, and most controversially for post-Ecclestone affair New Labour, Formula One motor racing.

While the end of the tobacco era will be the subject of animated conversations in the watering holes of Soho over the next few days, it will not just be the financial rewards that will be missed.

Simon North, managing director of cdp-sullytravis, which is responsible for the Hamlet and Silk Cut campaigns, explained the sense of loss felt by the industry. "The great thing that we've been able to do with cigarette advertising is be extremely creative," he said. "There were so many restrictions, so many things we couldn't do that we had to scratch our heads and really push the boundaries to make our message heard in a highly regulated market."

The most striking campaigns began after the introduction of a voluntary code of practice in 1975 which, most notably, ruled out any suggestion that cigarette smoking could be aspirational.

At a stroke, it wiped out the continuation of Benson & Hedges' former advertising that associated the brand with the finer things in life such as Ascot and Glyndebourne. Instead, it introduced the baffling "surreal" campaign, starting with a packet in a birdcage and including the iconoclastic images of a box of cigarettes among the pyramids.

"We had to really work harder. Nobody understood the surreal campaign but it worked. In its heyday, Benson & Hedges was nearly 30 per cent of the UK market."

One fear shared by campaigners is that the ban will trigger a price war fuelled by the cash the companies save on advertising. A price war broke out in Australia after advertising was banned there, and in Britain the Tobacco Manufacturers Association has warned that if the same happened here a ban on advertising could increase consumption.

The Department of Health predicts that after all forms of tobacco advertising and sponsorship are banned, consumption will drop by 2.5 per cent, saving 3,000 lives a year and £20m to £40m from the NHS bill for treating smokers.

This figure is regarded as conservative. The World Bank estimates consumption could fall by as much as 6-7 per cent, saving up to 8,000 lives a year. But some issues have still to be resolved. Clothing carrying tobacco logos such as the "Marlboro Classic" range, known as brand-sharing products, still have no deadline by which they must be phased out, though it is expected to be mid-way through 2004. Regulations are also still awaited on point of sale advertising – banners on shops and shelves advertising brands – which is likely to be permitted.

Amanda Sandford of the anti-smoking pressure group, Ash, said: "This is the single biggest weakness of the Act but it depends how tightly worded the regulations are. We feel it is totally wrong because it undermines the spirit of the Act which is to ban all forms of promotion. But we are obviously delighted. It has been a long hard haul. That press and poster advertising are finally going is a great blessing."

Tobacco was the subject of the first national advertising campaign ever seen in the 1790s when Lorillard in America distributed posters via post offices and saw its brand prosper. Since then, tobacco has become what advertising expert John Tylee of Campaign magazine described as "the ad industry's Faustian pact. In return for being allowed to produce some of the most innovative and memorable work in its history, it has been condemned to promoting a serial killer".

Despite rapid falls in smoking, tobacco still causes 120,000 deaths a year, most from lung cancer and heart disease.

 © 2001 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd