Cigarette advertisement campaigns have a long and colorful history. During the first half of the twentieth century and continuing on until the nineteen seventies, cigarette advertising was highly prevalent both on radio and television, and many who grew up or otherwise lived through that era remember the catchy cigarette advertisements and cigarette ad slogans. Vintage cigarette ads such as the 1960's cigarette ads had memorable slogans like: "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should", "Springtime... It happens every Salem", and so on. From 1949 to 1956 the first regular TV newscast, titled the Camel News Caravan, was sponsored by Camel cigarettes (a brand created by R.J. Reynolds Tobacco in 1913) and featured a newscaster who had an ashtray on his desk and a Camel logo in the background.

However, Marlboro cigarette ads, Kool cigarette ads, Winston cigarette ads and all of the other cigarettes ads were stricken from the airwaves in the early nineteen seventies in the United States (this was called the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act). Since then the other advertisements for cigarettes have also been kept under constant attack by the anti smoking movement, which has increased in strength and visibility with its lawsuits regarding the false advertising of cigarettes. Marlboro cigarette advertisements, Winston cigarette advertising and the Kool cigarette ad campaign have had to include the Surgeon General's Warning with a description of how smoking cigarettes is bad for your health (this is called the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act, and it applies to all cigarette advertisement).

In recent years as a result cigarette advertisement has been mostly kept to billboards and magazines. Most cigarette advertisement campaigns are largely focused on billboards, with up to ten percent of the billboards in some states in the U.S. being taken up with cigarette advertisements. In the United States many of the most recent battles over cigarette advertisement have involved the proximity of cigarette advertisement to schools and the publishing of cigarette advertisement in magazines which are distributed to students or into student libraries. Other countries in the western world have also passed their own laws over the past few decades limiting cigarette advertisement as the health influence has become widely known: these laws include the Australian Tobacco Advertising Prohibition Act of 1992, the Canada Tobacco Products Control Act of 1988 and the earliest ban on television commercials for cigarettes came in the United Kingdom in 1965 as a result of complaints from the Royal College of Physicians. Partly as a result of these cuts in cigarette advertisement, cigarette advertisement memorabilia have become a collector's item among many.