Can You Spot The Difference? 17 Outrageously Unimaginative Tobacco Advertisements

"We don't smoke the ****, we just sell it. We reserve the right to smoke for the young, the poor, the black and the stupid." - RJ Reynolds executive. Surprise surprise! Tobacco companies spend buckets of money targeting African Americans, but their advertising designers are astonishingly unimaginative. Why try to recognize different cultures when you can simply swap the models and then run the ad in Ebony magazine?

1. The tobacco industry spares no detail in its ultimate conquest to appeal to EVERY consumer... no matter their preference in cake:

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2. It's genuinely tough to determine if these are the same legs, just photoshopped, or a different model wearing the exact same outfit...

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The hands might give it away...

3. Because nothing screams "youthful summers" like eating cotton candy, hanging out at a theme park/lake, and smoking cigarettes...

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4. Take these heartfelt couples, for example. Each ad is targeted to a different audience, yet the pizza remains the same...

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5. Here's another set of couples, wearing the same outfits, visiting the same place, smoking the same cigarettes.....

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6. Must have been pretty laborious for these models to groom their mustaches the EXACT same way...

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7. Same dress shirt. Same belt. Same serious expression. Same choice of jewelry. Same cigarette. But most importantly, same 'fro.

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8. Eighty-eight percent of African American smokers prefer to smoke menthol, so if you look at the ad on the left, you'd notice that the menthols are in the front....

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9. Moving on to the classy part of selling cigarettes...

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10. Breaking news: these two ladies ran into each other at the same party later that night. Awkwardness ensued.

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11. "You've got what it takes" besides the whole "being old enough to legally buy tobacco" thing:

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12. Conclusion to draw from this set of ads: African-Americans don't have shadows and are thus vampires. Also, pantaloons will never go out of style.

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13. Cringe. Just cringe.

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14. How is he supposed to walk an entire mile when he's coughing the whole way?

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15. Yes, race-based advertising has far from frosted over:

16. Almost everything is similar here, from the frizzy hair down to the wrist accessory, but one key difference is that ad on the left, of course, advertises menthols:

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17. Who's More Satisfied? Big Tobacco, that's who..

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If this list opened your eyes to how scummy these tobacco companies are, check out tobacco.stanford.edu to learn all about present-day and historical marketing practices utilized by Big Tobacco!