I Took a Job at Big Tobacco and Learned What Marketing Actually Is

In the summer of 2015, I accepted a job at Altria to lead Customer Acquisition for their e-cigarette division. SEO, CRO, web analytics. The full stack of things you do when you're trying to get people to find your product online and then actually do something once they get there.

Everyone in my life had opinions about this.

The Opinions

My mother's was a long silence followed by "and you're sure about this?" Which was something, coming from her, because she'd been smoking cigarettes for fifty years. My brother, my dad, all of them smoked. I grew up in a house where someone was smoking a hundred percent of the time, and I'm not exaggerating for effect, I mean there was always a lit cigarette somewhere in that house. The smell was in the walls, the furniture, my clothes at school. I woke up every morning to the sound of my mom's smoker's cough from the other room, and that was my alarm clock for about eighteen years. My brother eventually quit after fifteen years, my dad after twenty, but my mom tried more times than I can remember and it never stuck.

My friends went straight to the cancer jokes, as if I'd personally invented smoking. One friend who worked at some SaaS company making software nobody used asked me how I could sleep at night. I told him my product at least had product-market fit. He hasn't spoken to me since, though to be fair his company no longer exists, so maybe he's just been busy.

My girlfriend at the time, a lovely long-legged Slovenian quantum physics PhD student, threatened to leave me if I took the job. I didn't care, I wanted to be cool like Nick Naylor in Thank You for Smoking. She left me exactly two weeks after I started, which in retrospect was both predictable and deserved.

Nobody understood why I took that job, and honestly I probably should have examined my own reasoning more carefully at the time. I didn't join Altria despite hating tobacco. I joined because of it. The e-cigarette division felt like the part of the company that was trying to make cigarettes obsolete, and that was the story you told yourself when you took a job like this: you're not working for Big Tobacco, you're working for the part of Big Tobacco that's trying to kill Big Tobacco. You're on the right side of the transition. You're helping smokers like your mom find something less likely to kill them. That's what I told myself, anyway.

The Binder

The first thing they gave me was a compliance binder. Three inches thick. It tells you, in painstaking legal detail, every single thing you are not permitted to do in the course of your job. At a normal company they give you a list of your responsibilities. At a tobacco company they give you a list of everything that will get you investigated by a federal agency.

Google won't run ads for tobacco products. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, none of them will either. You can't do influencer marketing. You can't sponsor events in most contexts. You can't do outdoor advertising in a lot of states. You can't email anyone you haven't age-verified through a legitimate process, which rules out basically all email marketing as any normal marketer understands it. Every piece of content, every landing page, every line of copy goes through legal review, which takes weeks, and the lawyers are not in a hurry because their job is to keep you out of trouble, not to hit your content calendar.

The FDA has people whose entire job is to look at your marketing materials and find things wrong with them, and they are very good at it.

What Was Left

So there I was, a marketer whose job was to acquire customers with basically no tools to acquire customers. No paid search, no paid social, no display, no retargeting, no influencers, no sponsorships. What was left was organic search, conversion rate optimization, web analytics, and whatever I could build with my own hands.

It was terrifying for about two weeks and then I stopped missing the tools I didn't have. When you don't have the option to buy traffic, you pay very close attention to the traffic you get for free. Every visitor matters because there's no budget to go get more. You can't be sloppy with your funnel because there's no retargeting to catch the people who leak out. If someone comes to your site and doesn't convert, that's it. They're gone. You don't get a second shot.

I became obsessive about the conversion funnel. I watched session recordings the way some people watch TV, just hours of people clicking around on our site, watching where they got confused, where they hesitated, where the experience fell apart. I tested everything. Not in the "we A/B tested our button color" way people talk about at conferences. I mean I tested everything: page structure, form length, copy variations, layout changes, load times, mobile flows, the whole path from landing to conversion.

I quadrupled the conversion rate. Not "improved" it, quadrupled it, and the reason wasn't that I was smarter than anyone else but that I had nowhere else to put my energy. When every other channel is locked, you get very good at the one channel you have, and you stop thinking about marketing as a collection of channels and start thinking about it as a much simpler question: do I understand what this person wants, and am I giving it to them?

In my second year they also handed me the affiliate program for Green Smoke, one of Altria's e-cigarette brands. I watched that brand go up in flames in slow motion. By the time I left the company it was essentially gone.

Building Before It Was Cool

In my third year they moved me into the Strategy & Planning department of the e-cig division. No official title - I was an untitled special researcher, which is what happens when someone builds things a Fortune 500 doesn't have a job description for yet. This is where I started introducing AI and text analytics to the organization. This was before everyone in marketing had opinions about AI. Before ChatGPT. Before any of that. I was building NLP tools, text mining capabilities, things that let us extract signal from the massive amounts of unstructured data the company was sitting on. I served marketing, R&D, and strategy - three departments that don't usually talk to each other much. The tools I built changed how decisions got made, at least in the corners of the company I could reach.

I'm still proud of that work. What came next is harder to talk about.

What I Watched Happen

By 2018 I'd been at Altria for nearly three years. I'd been following the e-cigarette industry closely, not just from inside the building but from the outside too, reading everything, watching the regulatory moves, tracking what the company said publicly versus what seemed to be happening behind the scenes.

And what seemed to be happening, if you watched carefully enough, was that the company's unofficial strategy was to quietly choke out the entire e-cigarette industry - the same industry I'd been hired to help grow.

I want to be extremely precise about this because I value my ability to sleep at night without being sued. I'm not claiming insider knowledge of boardroom strategy or access to confidential planning documents. What I'm describing is what any industry observer could see: the public regulatory environment, publicly reported lobbying activities, market outcomes, and the fact that a company selling billions in combustible cigarettes didn't seem particularly motivated to accelerate their own obsolescence. You can draw your own conclusions from the same public information I'm drawing from.

I drew mine the night I stumbled onto a Wikipedia article about a report that Philip Morris commissioned in the Czech Republic in 2001. It was 2am. I should have been asleep. Instead I spent the next three hours going down a rabbit hole, watching my entire understanding of what I was doing with my life collapse.

The report, prepared by Arthur D. Little - because when you want to put a dollar value on human death, you hire consultants with a middle name - didn't just conclude that smokers dying early was a net positive for the Czech government, they quantified it. Each smoker who died prematurely saved the government $1,227. Not approximately. Exactly $1,227. Someone had built a spreadsheet.

The report had a section called "positive effects." Positive effects. Reduced healthcare costs for the elderly who were now dead. Reduced pension payments to people who would no longer be collecting them. Reduced housing subsidies for the formerly alive. The math was clean, professional, presented in charts and graphs. Someone at Philip Morris had paid consultants to calculate the financial upside of their customers dying, and the consultants delivered.

The report was presented to Czech government officials as an argument against tobacco regulation. The pitch was: let us keep killing your citizens because it saves you money when they die. When it became public, the backlash was immediate. Philip Morris apologized, called it "a terrible mistake," said the findings were "not appropriate." But someone had commissioned the study. Someone had reviewed the methodology. Someone had sat in a meeting, looked at a presentation about the financial benefits of dead smokers, and decided it was worth presenting to a government. The apology came after they got caught.

Corporate genealogy: Philip Morris International, the entity that commissioned the report, and Altria, where I worked, used to be the same company. Altria was called Philip Morris Companies until 2003. In 2008 they split. By 2017, when I was working there, they'd been separate companies for nearly a decade. Different boards, different CEOs, different stock tickers. But they grew from the same root.

And I'm sitting there at 2am reading about financial models that calculated the value of dead smokers, thinking about my mother, who I'd been listening to cough every morning for eighteen years. Thinking about how I took this job because I thought I was helping build the technology that would make cigarettes obsolete.

Realizing you might have been an instrument in something closer to the opposite is the kind of thing that stays with you.

I don't know if anyone at Altria in 2017 thought the way the people who commissioned that report thought in 2001. I have no evidence they did. I'm not claiming they did. I wasn't in those rooms. I never saw internal strategy documents. But I read that report, and then I watched what seemed to be happening in the industry, and I couldn't un-see it.

That's where a little voice inside me said, probably for the first time, "Fuck this industry. Fuck these people. Fuck the salary with which I buy my cannabis and sushi dinners. The sushi has too much mercury in it anyway, and the weed is probably full of pesticide. Fuck the Steam games, they're giving me carpal tunnel and bad sleeping habits. Fuck this job, too."

The Intercept piece from December 2018 laid out a version of this that was more detailed than anything I could say. Altria purchased a 35% stake in Juul for $12.8 billion. The deal put Juul devices on shelves next to Marlboro. It gave Juul access to Altria's massive retail distribution network and its army of Washington lobbyists. On paper it looked like a tobacco giant embracing the future. If you'd been inside the industry watching the moves that led up to it, it looked like something else entirely.

I left Altria in late 2018.

The Backfire

What happened next was instructive, if you like watching $12.8 billion evaporate. The vaping illness crisis hit, regulatory pressure exploded, the public turned against e-cigarettes, and Juul's value collapsed. By the end of 2019, Altria had taken $8.6 billion in write-downs on that investment, including a $4.1 billion charge in January 2020 alone that cratered the stock price. The whole thing was a spectacular, slow-motion disaster.

I don't know what the board was thinking when they wrote that check. I don't know if the strategy I observed from the inside was the strategy they thought they were executing. Corporate strategy at that scale is a hall of mirrors and I was never a C-suite executive. What I know is what I watched happen, and what I watched happen didn't look like a company that wanted e-cigarettes to succeed.

What I Took With Me

Three and a half years at Big Tobacco taught me that when you strip away every marketing shortcut, what remains is the actual work: understanding the customer, making the funnel tight, earning attention instead of buying it. Twenty years in this industry and nothing else has come close.

It also taught me I could build things. Not campaigns - actual tools, systems, capabilities that didn't exist before I got there. The AI work in 2017 showed me that the wall between marketing and engineering is one most people put up themselves.

I did good work at Altria. I'm not embarrassed by any of the marketing I did there. The conversion rate improvements were real. The analytics tools were useful. The customer acquisition work was solid. But I joined that company because my mom couldn't quit smoking and I thought I was helping build the alternative. That the larger machine appeared to have different priorities is something I still think about.

The Part Nobody's LinkedIn Post Mentions

This is the thing about working in regulated industries that nobody's "5 Things I Learned" post ever gets into. The regulations aren't just constraints on your marketing, they're signals about the stakes. When the government cares enough about your industry to write a three-inch binder of rules about what you can and can't say, that's because real things happen to real people based on what your company does. The constraints force you to be a better marketer, yes, but they also force you to think about what you're marketing, and why, and for whose benefit.

I think about this every time someone asks me about working in regulated industries, which people do now because it's apparently a niche. I tell them what I've told you: the marketing constraints will make you better. The conversion work will make you sharper. The experience will be the most valuable thing on your resume.

And then I tell them to pay close attention to the gap between what a company says it's doing and what it's actually doing. That gap is everywhere. It's just harder to ignore when the FDA is involved.