People were smoking cigarettes before the Marlboro Man first appeared on billboards and television screens in 1954.
However, there's an argument to be made that the world wasn't addicted to smoking until Philip Morris International — then Philip Morris & Co. — revolutionized the cigarette industry with its incredibly successful marketing campaign of "Marlboro masculinity."
Cigarette sales skyrocketed when the Marlboro Man rode into American pop culture. And where better to find the authentic American cowboy than in Wyoming?
The savvy marketing campaign that turned Marlboro from an obscure brand into one of the most recognizable on the planet romanticized the authenticity and machismo of the American cowboy. Those people and places came from real ranches in Wyoming.
Then, it could be argued that Wyoming helped get the world hooked on cigarettes.
"The advertising people from Philip Morris would go to Wyoming rodeos and stuff, watching and looking for people who were the real deal," said Robyn Cutter with the Park County Archives. "Once they started putting Wyoming ranches and cowboys on their billboards, the sales statistics would floor you."
Marlboro Masculinity
Philip Morris has long been proud of its immensely successful marketing of the Marlboro Man from its inception. Many of the key people who cultivate the concept were featured in a corporate documentary, "The Marlboro Story," produced in 1969.
In Marlboro's own story, it had been an obscure cigarette brand since its founding in 1924. The early 1950s were "an agonizing period" in the company's history because men weren't buying Marlboros.
The reason? The packaging was too feminine, and men didn't want to smoke filtered cigarettes.
In 1954, Marlboro began to revitalize its product by introducing its "revolutionary" flip-top box.
Even so, the company still needed to up the ante, so it turned to the Leo Burnett Co., founded by Leo Burnett in Chicago, Illinois, for a new marketing campaign.
Burnett's company is responsible for marketing icons like the Jolly Green Giant, the Pillsbury Doughboy, and the lonely Maytag Repairman. When they were hired by Marlboro in 1954, they didn't know they were on the cusp of one of the most impactful advertising campaigns in history.
"(Marlboro) told us they didn't expect miracles overnight," Burnett said in the documentary. "Run one of the ads prepared by a previous agency and continue the campaign until we are ready for a full-fledged recommendation.
"I said, 'To hell with that,' in so many words. What we can do for a new brand of cigarettes is not going to be someone else's ad."
Since "filtered cigarettes (were) sissy," Burnett and his team brainstormed with Marlboro to develop a more masculine marketing campaign. He asked them to think of "the most masculine symbol" they could think of.
"One of these writers spoke up and said, 'A cowboy.' So, I said, 'That's for sure. Let's make a big sketch of a cowboy.' So far, so good. We've got a masculine image," Burnett said.
In less than 24 hours, according to Burnett, they had the foundation of Marlboro's future. The finished black-and-white ad featured a cowboy smoking "the new easy-drawing filter cigarette that delivers the goods on flavor."
"I just jumped out of my chair," Burnett said. "Every instinct I had told me that this was it."
"Filter. Flavor. Flip-Top Box." The age of Marlboro masculinity had begun.
The Marlboro Men (And Those Who Weren't)
Burnett and his advertising team decided to build on their concept of "Marlboro masculinity" by featuring what the world perceived as the manliest men and professions in their print and television ads. Of course, their cigarette of choice was unquestionably Marlboro.
"They started with sea captains, pilots, and athletic people," Cutter said. "They went into using models with a Western appearance, but they weren't real cowboys."
The success of Marlboro's new advertisements was astonishing. Philip Morris went from selling 18 million cigarettes in 1954 to 6.5 billion in 1955, and 14 billion in 1956.
Despite this success, something still wasn't working for Burnett and Marlboro. According to Cutter, the answer became obvious when they reviewed their work.
"You could tell that the models they were using weren't real cowboys," she said. "Even now, you can look at those photos and advertisements and tell it's a model, not a real cowboy."
Marlboro had several advertising campaigns of "men relaxing and enjoying their cigarettes," famous football players and actors saying "there's a lot to like" on television, and several jingles written to reflect the musical tastes of the 1950s.
John Landry, then vice president of Philip Morris, oversaw the new marketing campaigns. After years of trial and error, the company said it wanted "a single symbol of masculinity" to personify the brand.
"The one recurring symbol, the one type who projected the sharpest image of the Marlboro Man, was the American cowboy," he said. "In a world that was becoming increasingly complex and frustrating for ordinary men, the cowboy represented an antithesis. He was his own man, in a world he owned."
Sea captains and athletes were out. Cowboys were the new kings of "Marlboro Country."
"Wherever people smoked for flavor, that was Marlboro Country," Landry said.
Finding The Marlboro Men
It wasn't enough to stick a man dressed like a cowboy on a Marlboro advertisement. Like a nature documentary, Burnett, Landry, and the Marlboro marketing team wanted to showcase real cowboys in their natural habitat.
"This was the next refinement in our advertising," Landry said. "To put the cowboy in his world. And when we did, he became a more believable symbol of masculinity. In visual terms, he was at his strongest. Words were extraneous."
The most famous Marlboro cowboy, the quintessential Marlboro Man, was Darrel Winfield.
He was discovered by Burnett's team while working on his ranch in June 1968.
"I had seen cowboys, but I had never seen one that just really, like, he sort of scared the hell out of me," Burnett said of Winfield.
Winfield never wore make-up for advertising shoots and always wore make-up — and went on to be the most marketed man for Marlboro from 1968 to 1989. When he retired, Marlboro reportedly spent nearly $300 million looking for a suitable replacement.
Cutter has met several Marlboro men and several others who interviewed but were turned down.
Many are still tied to the Sunlight, Rimrock, Pitchfork, and Switchback Ranches, where Marlboro would show up to film cowboys in their element, even as late as the 1980s.
"There are so many local connections," she said. "One of the men I spoke to interviewed to be a Marlboro Man but got turned away because he couldn't spell ‘Marlboro.' During one of my programs, I met a woman whose daughter was married to Winfield's son, and the family still owns the Winfield Ranch outside Riverton."
Marlboro reveled in its dynamic cinematography of cowboys wrangling cattle, riding horses against the backdrop of the mountains of northwest Wyoming, and wrapping themselves in a saddle blanket next to the fire to settle in for the night.
There was always the opportunity to light up a Marlboro filtered cigarette.
Soon, images of Marlboro Men — primarily Wyoming men on Wyoming ranches — were on television screens and billboards around the world.
Many of those advertisements were accompanied by Elmer Bernstein's theme from "The Magnificent Seven," soon more ubiquitous as the "Marlboro Man Theme" than the movie it was written for.
"Marlboro came out here to find the real deal," Cutter said. "Not just the people, but the landscapes. They needed that iconic scenery."
Numbers Don't Lie
To say Marlboro was pleased with the "Marlboro Man" campaign would be an understatement.
Marlboro went from selling 18 million cigarettes in 1954 to over 22 billion in 1960, according to Stanford University. By the end of 1969, the company had sold more than 44 billion cigarettes and was among the best-selling brands in the cigarette market.
In less than a decade, Marlboro went from "the sissy cigarette" to one of the world's best-known and most valuable brands. Its success in the United States led to similar campaigns with similar results in the international market.
Marlboro was so successful that Landry could openly throw shade at what he called the "inevitable imitators," like Campbell's, the Ford Motor Co., and even other cigarette sellers that suddenly started featuring cowboys and Western themes in their marketing.
"Some people, who tried to capitalize on our success, seem to think it's public domain," he said. "Of course, imitation is just one indicator of a successful campaign. The important one is sales."
The juggernaut of the Marlboro Man also seemed to supersede the health concerns about cigarettes, which were being raised as early as the 1950s.
The iconography of Marlboro's advertising was overpowering dissent, even though five Marlboro Men would go on to die of smoking-related illnesses.
The authenticity of the American cowboy and the spectacular landscapes of the American West were the catalyst for this success. Those people and places came from Wyoming, which is what Cutter finds so fascinating.
"I'm just looking at it from a different light," she said. "I've never smoked a cigarette in my life, but the whole story of Marlboro is quite interesting, and they came to Wyoming to do it."
Wyoming Is Marlboro County
Marlboro isn't anywhere near as invincible today as it was in the heyday of the Marlboro Men. Smoking has been on a steady decline for decades, and the deleterious impacts of tobacco continue to make mass marketing of cigarettes a hard sell.
Cutter was researching the history of Park County's cigarette tax when she took a deep dive into Wyoming's role in Marlboro's marketing success.
"I never thought the cigarette tax brought in any money, but from 2007 to 2025, Cody received $1,361,361 from the tax," she said. "Powell got $638,279 over the same period, and Meeteetse got $22,506. I never would have guessed we were selling that many cigarettes."
As Cutter combed through old Marlboro advertisements, she could look beyond the images and recognize the people and places.
Marlboro became a multibillion-dollar company through its Marlboro Man campaign, and Wyoming was critical to that success.
"A lot of people have no clue about any of this history," she said. "I can remember seeing the huge billboards of the Marlboro Men in the downtown areas of St. Paul, Minnesota, when I was growing up. People all over the world saw those billboards. They were very iconic."
There isn't a single mention of Wyoming in "The Marlboro Story," but the executives behind the Marlboro Men campaign don't mince words.
For better and worse, their meteoric success was built on the back of authentic cowboys working in the American West, and they found exactly what they wanted in Wyoming.
"This is the Marlboro story," Landry said. "A story of how a specialty cigarette developed an image so powerful it became part of the American language.
"A masculine image so well defined that today, the cowboy is synonymous with Marlboro. There's no doubt about it: you are in Marlboro Country."
Andrew Rossi can be reached at arossi@cowboystatedaily.com.
