Rethinking the Image

Image source: https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/497718196309917444/ (Accessed: 18 September 2025). © Collett Dickenson Pearce & Partners

In a recent article, I examined how regulatory and legislative changes in the United Kingdom from the 1970s onwards forced tobacco brands to adopt highly creative visual strategies, often centring around surreal or irrelevant imagery.

One particularly notable element of these strategies was an ongoing process of visual concentration^[1][2], which served to satisfy ever-tightening regulation^[3][4] while enabling tobacco companies to communicate new messages about their brands.

Throughout the late 20th century, the visual identities of tobacco brands such as Silk Cut and Benson & Hedges became increasingly distilled, relying increasingly on their own familiarity in order to be recognised. Tobacco advertisements became both increasingly ludic and increasingly reminiscent of fine art, fostering connotations of intelligence and sophistication.

Figure 1: https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O75989/pyramids-poster-godfrey-neil/?carousel-image=2014HG5563 (Accessed: 1 December 2024).

The Benson & Hedges brand is often said to have pioneered the cryptic, irrelevant approach to tobacco advertising^[3], with its late 1970s ‘Pyramids’ advertisement (figure 1) being undoubtedly the most celebrated example of the phenomenon^[5] – to the extent that it was even parodied by Gauloises, the French tobacco brand, several years later (figure 1a).

Figure 1a: https://50ansdepubs.com/Pubs/pub.php?p=Tabacs/Gauloises/1824 (Accessed: 1 December 2024).

‘Pyramids’ is typical of Benson & Hedges’ early work with advertising agency Collett Dickenson Pearce^[1][6]. These images displayed the gold Benson & Hedges pack in a range of surreal situations, often artificially scaled to endow it with a monolithic quality and, in turn, a sense of authority and status^[6].

Figure 2: https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/497718196309961876/ (Accessed: 1 December 2024).

In ‘Wringer’ (figure 2), likely dating from the mid-1980s, the pack is no longer intact, having undergone a surprising and surreal transformation. The brand name, however, is still visible – albeit upside down – with a warm light casting a luxurious sheen over the transformed pack, which appears to have been pressed into solid gold. Here, the concept of gold, both in terms of colour and material, is an increasingly important signifier of the brand, generating connotations of refinement, taste, and quality.

Figure 3: https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/497718196309904544/ (Accessed: 1 December 2024).

In the 1986 ‘Running Tap’ advertisement (figure 3)^[7], the pack is abandoned entirely, with an irrelevant set of objects – a pair of taps – taking its place. The warm light leads the viewer to the tap on the right of the image, which appears particularly bright – this element of the image works in a similar way to the transformed pack in ‘Wringer’; under the light, the tap takes on a radiance which gives the impression of solid gold.

In this image, it is the brand name itself that has undergone a transformation, flowing freely from the running tap – an example of the tendency of modern advertising to present textual elements in pictorial form^[8] – with the capitalised ‘B’ and ‘H’ being particularly legible. There is a further ludic detail in the labelling of ‘Hot’ and ‘Gold’ on the handles of the two taps.

Figure 4: https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/497718196309917444/ (Accessed: 1 December 2024).

In ‘Pencil Shavings’ (figure 4), the process of visual concentration is seen at its end point. This image relies almost entirely on the government health warning and the colour gold to be understood, with its extremely subtle references to branding (on the edges of the shavings) serving as an intelligent reminder of the brand without disrupting the image’s aesthetically pleasing quality.

David Scott^[9] notes that “where there is an image there is always an implied text, even if it is absent or invisible”^[10]. Throughout the process of visual concentration that takes place in these images, the implied text (Benson & Hedges) is always present, facilitated by the mandatory government health warning^[4] and by the “ongoing narrative” generated by the themes of the images^[11] (art, surrealism, playfulness, and, most notably, gold).

As the viewer becomes increasingly familiar with this ongoing narrative, the brand is able to continue the concentration of its visual identity, allowing it to communicate with, and to connote, increasing levels of sophistication.

[1] V&A (2003) Pyramids. Available at: https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O75989/pyramids-poster-godfrey-neil/ (Accessed: 18 September 2025).

[2] D&AD (2019) Dave Trott on Bravery and the Creative Industries. 3 April. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGPuMkbQ4UI&t=327s (Accessed: 18 September 2025).

[3] Parker-Pope, T. (1996) ‘Tough Tobacco-Ad Rules Light Creative Fires’, The Wall Street Journal, 9 October. Available at: https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/tobacco/docs/#id=yspg0080 (Accessed: 18 September 2025).

[4] Action on Smoking and Health (no date) Key Dates in Tobacco Regulation. Available at: https://ash.org.uk/uploads/Key-Dates_2022-04-21-101255_ajre.pdf (Accessed: 18 September 2025).

[5] BBC News (1999) Sales Pitches of the Century. Available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/476117.stm (Accessed: 18 September 2025).

[6] Moran, S. (no date) B&H Surreal Ads. Available at: https://uk.pinterest.com/stevemoranis/bh-surreal-ads/ (Accessed: 18 September 2025).

[7] Figure 3 shows the advertisement without the government health warning that accompanied it at the time of publication. See https://csts.ua.edu/silk-cut/ (Accessed: 18 September 2025) for further confirmation of the date of this advertisement.

[8] Scott, D. (2010) Poetics of the Poster: The Rhetoric of Image-Text. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, p. 13.

[9] David Scott is a prominent academic and semiologist who has written extensively on theories of visual studies, notably with regard to advertising and the poster.

[10] Scott, D. (2010), p. 110.

[11] Scott, D. (2010), p. 109.