WORLD: STUART ELLIOTT IN AMERICA.

Since February, the RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company has heralded Winston cigarettes, one of its four principal brands, with a creative campaign proclaiming: 'Leave the bull behind.' Now, alas, it's the campaign that Reynolds is leaving behind, as it ends advertising for Winston and another core brand, Doral.

That shocking news came last month as part of major cost-cutting by Reynolds that includes layoffs. The culprit: a far harsher competitive climate because of rampant discounting by Philip Morris, which, as the number-one American cigarette company, has almost twice the market share of Reynolds and thus sets the tone in the estimated dollars 63 billion domestic industry.

The 'Leave the bull behind' creative, from a small Philadelphia agency Gyro Advertising, was only the most recent in a skein of efforts by Reynolds to revive Winston's flagging fortunes. Before that, it was a campaign themed 'No bull,' and before that, a campaign focused on a line extension, Winston Select, and before that, a campaign centred on new packaging nicknamed 'The Wrap,' and before that ... well, you get the idea.

The idea that there will no longer be ads for Winston is hard to process for consumers of a certain age, for whom the brand was an early object lesson in the ways Madison Avenue could create demand for products that, until they existed, people didn't know they wanted. Reynolds brought out Winston in 1954 as one of the first of a generation of mass-market filter cigarettes, capitalising on concerns about the health effects of smoking, which knocked off a cadre of entrenched non-filter brands such as Chesterfield, Lucky Strike, Old Gold and Pall Mall.

The nascent brand gained its momentum through a nascent ...