“Cigars, cigarettes, Tiparillos?” You almost have to whisper the words when you say them. This stylish black-and-white commercial placed a glamorous cigarette girl inside a crowded nightclub, where she quietly offered Tiparillos from the tray hanging around her neck.
Tiparillo was a small, mild cigar with a white plastic mouthpiece. Even its name explained the product, combining “tip” and “cigarillo.” The name was trademarked in 1961, and General Cigar reportedly spent about $5.5 million promoting the new product during its 1962 national launch.
The campaign borrowed the familiar image of the nightclub cigarette girl, who once walked through restaurants, casinos and clubs selling tobacco products directly from a tray. The softly delivered “Cigars, cigarettes, Tiparillos?” became so memorable that people continued repeating it decades after the commercials disappeared.
Sales began slowly but took off by 1963, helping General Cigar become the dominant company in America’s small-cigar market. The following year, the Surgeon General’s report on smoking caused some cigarette smokers to briefly switch to cigars, giving Tiparillo another boost.
Tiparillo later introduced its equally famous “Should a gentleman offer a Tiparillo to a lady?” campaign. The ads featured fashionable, successful women, although Stanford’s tobacco advertising archive notes that the women were generally presented as accepting the cigars rather than actually smoking them.
When cigarette commercials disappeared from American television in 1971, little cigars initially escaped the ban. Congress closed that loophole with the Little Cigar Act of 1973, bringing commercials like this one to an end.
Do you remember the commercial itself, or does simply hearing “Cigars, cigarettes, Tiparillos?” bring it all back?
