At roughly the same time that the boss called in Bernays, Lasker was also tasked with engineering greater demand among women for Lucky Strike. This was the beginning of the “Reach for a Lucky” campaign. Far cruder and more conventional than Bernays’s effort, it also likely sold more cigarettes to women than all the torches of Easter. Lasker started from advertising’s most tried and true premise, borrowed from patent medicine: cigarettes needed to be a cure for something—if not sore throats, then what? Noticing that women often expressed concern about their weight, he came up with the idea of selling Lucky Strike as a remedy for excess weight, a diet aid. The original slogan “Reach for a Lucky instead of a Bon-Bon” soon became “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet,” and would long be remembered simply as “Reach for a Lucky.”

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 241