Iconic ad campaigns just aren't the same without the right colours, fonts and logos.

In what The Australian is calling “the world’s most draconian anti-smoking laws”, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd today announced that from 2012, all cigarettes will be sold in plain packets with labels in a standard typeface. No company logos. No colours. No recognisable fonts. No tobacco brand imagery. No advertising copy.

The Rudd government – which recently jettisoned its previous climate change and childcare commitments in order to make health the key battleground in this year’s election – aims to bring down Australia’s smoking rate to less than 10 per cent of the adult population by 2018.

In 1980, 40 per cent of Australian men and 29 per cent of women smoked (34 per cent of the population). Thanks to successive waves of legislation, by 2007 that rate was reduced to 21 per cent of men and 18 per cent of women (19 per cent of adults).

Are the new laws really the breach of trademark law and confiscation of property that Big Tobacco is arguing? Absolutely not, wrote public health academic Simon Chapman in Crikey back in March. Chapman says the cigarette companies’ arguments against plain packaging “range from the very silly, to the very, very silly”. He calls them a “desperate bluff”.

Indeed, the Australian tobacco market actually grew by 2.9 per cent between 2004 and 2008, despite an increasingly inhospitable marketing environment.

Public health issues aside, this latest move is perhaps the biggest advertising challenge the tobacco industry has faced in a half-century that has seen it respond cleverly to just about every regulatory hurdle thrown in its path. Being denied colour as well as design is an especially harsh blow; tobacco companies currently use colours to differentiate varieties within a brand, since they are no longer allowed to refer to them as “mild”, “extra mild” or “light”.

Hilariously, the products might well keep their colourful names (eg “Dunhill Blue”), even if that colour itself appears nowhere on the pack. Presumably the actual cigarettes inside the packets will still be able to bear whatever colours and logos the companies like. Perhaps companies will begin to get around the plain packaging laws by making their branding more obvious on the product itself – much as Viagra pills are widely known to be small and blue.

It’s also worth asking whether the new legislation will force all cigarette packs into a standard size. Even non-smokers know that cigarette brands come in various lengths and pack sizes, from long, slim Davidoffs to giant economy packs of Holidays and Horizons. To a practised eye, some brands might still stand out. And will they still come in soft-packs and hard-packs?

The Enthusiast predicts a thriving ‘grey market’ in cigarette-branded stickers and slipcases for the plain packs – much as entrepreneurs began to sell jocular stickers to cover up anti-smoking warnings. Also, cigarette cases – those old-fashioned unbranded cigarette packs – may well be poised for a comeback.