Joe Camel ("Smooth Character")

Why it works

A smirking cartoon camel in sunglasses. R.J. Reynolds brought "Old Joe" to American magazines and billboards in 1988 for Camel's 75th birthday, adapting a 1974 French campaign, to revive a brand then most popular with smokers over 65. He halted Camel's decline, though its overall market share barely moved. His real audience emerged in December 1991, when studies in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that teenagers recognised him far more readily than adults, that more than 91 per cent of six-year-olds could match him to a cigarette, and that Camel's share of the illegal under-18 market had leapt from 0.5 to almost 33 per cent. It is studied as the textbook case of a mascot that succeeded with exactly the audience it was forbidden to court. In July 1997, with the Federal Trade Commission pursuing the case, Reynolds retired Joe after nine years, as a proposed tobacco settlement would have banned cartoon characters from cigarette ads.