Fair play to Philip Morris International's PR or comms team.
Whether by luck or design (probably the latter) they do a pretty decent job promoting the company's smoke free agenda, and the way they have consistently generated headlines with occasional but widely reported interviews with senior executives should also be acknowledged.
A prime example is André Calantzopoulos' appearance on Radio 4's Today programme in 2016 when the then CEO created global headlines after he told the BBC that Philip Morris could stop making conventional cigarettes.
Another is a 2018 interview in which Peter Nixon, then managing director of Philip Morris UK, told the Independent, "There is no reason for anyone to smoke any more." (As it happens I think this was arguably an own goal but it nevertheless generated a lot of publicity.)
I could list other examples but the most recent was on Saturday when the Financial Times published an interview with Calantzopoulos' successor:
The chief executive of the world’s largest tobacco group Philip Morris International is not short of anecdotes in which he implored people to quit smoking.
Over a cigarette at a US embassy party in Warsaw in the mid-2000s, Jacek Olczak recited the health warning on a pack to the then-Polish health minister. A few years later, the minister, Zbigniew Religa, died of lung cancer.
More recently, Olczak gave his eldest daughter’s boyfriend a stark choice: quit smoking or switch to IQOS, PMI’s flagship smoke-free alternative, “or you will never date my daughter”. A year later, he switched.
Even allowing for the fact that the story was probably tongue-in-cheek, I appear to be alone in pointing out that it's 2023 yet Olczak seems happy to portray himself playing hardball with his eldest daughter's choice of boyfriend.
Did she have no agency in this?!
I sensed a similarly flippant tone when the Independent interviewed Peter Nixon in 2018:
Among his 400 employees in London apparently, there is one hold-out who still smokes. “I’m working on him though.”
It struck me then that with almost one in seven adults still smoking in the UK in 2018, it was a bit odd that of the 400 people working for Philip Morris in London only one was still a smoker.
Or perhaps, like the boyfriend of Jacek Olczak's daughter, they had been given an ultimatum.
See: Philip Morris's CEO on quitting smoking and detoxifying the brand.
Below: The FT's Oliver Barnes, who interviewed PMI's CEO, tweets ...
