There’s a new brand on the market called Koz. It’s hip, it’s young and it’s being launched with an innovative, grassroots marketing campaign that reaches its target audience squarely where it spends a lot of its time and money – dance clubs and urban chic clothing stores.

So, is it a new line of clothing, a funky new beverage or sticky, sweet candy? No, it’s the newest brand of cigarettes from Rothmans Benson & Hedges (rbh).

According to local Toronto retailers, Koz, the packaging for which makes no reference to rbh, but rather to an entity called The Light Zone Tobacco Company, became available two weeks ago in 11 stores concentrated in the trendy downtown district around Queen Street West. No distribution details were available for London, Ont., the other market where Koz has made an appearance.

Although nobody from the tobacco company would respond to inquiries about the new brand, it’s evident that Rothmans is taking a down-in-the-trenches approach to promoting Koz.

Working with Toronto-based out-of-home specialist NewAd Media, rbh has developed a promotional event called Kozmosis, which, according to slick foldout promo cards found among band stickers and party flyers in downtown Toronto’s ‘streetwear’ shops, is a ‘celebration of underground street fashion, music and visual art – a movement in underground culture’.

According to people familiar with the program, Kozmosis organizers invited five influential streetwear designers, (Toronto’s Fiction Graphics Clothing, Geek Boutique and SNUG Industries and Montreal’s Lithium and Luscious) to create their own fashion-inspired events in Toronto and London, Ont. clubs.

Given an undisclosed budget and creative carte blanche, the clothiers gathered visual artists and over 30 major international club talents, such as New York’s Grand Master Flash and Toronto’s Koto Drummers, to create seven distinct all-night dance events.

In keeping with rbh’s strategy of focusing on fashion and music and not cigarettes, at a recent Kozmosis event in Toronto, the actual presence of Koz cigarettes was limited to the discreet sale of packs and lighters in corners of the club. None of the event’s promotional materials made mention of the product, and no other branding materials were on display at the event.

Koz’ low key pitch for brand awareness stands in sharp contrast to RJR-Macdonald’s 1997 relaunch of its lifestyle-oriented brand, Red Kamel. At the centre of that relaunch was the ‘Red Kamel Event’, a national promotion where bar owners were reportedly paid in exchange for bringing extensive point-of-purchase presence, including retro ‘cigarette girls’, into their establishments. Red Kamel is no longer actively marketed in Canada.

So effective has rbh’s stealth launch strategy for Koz been that one of Toronto’s weekly entertainment newspapers, eye, devoted a full-page article in its Sept. 17 issue to describing the Kozmosis series, without any mention of tobacco sponsorship.

Gregory Boyd Bell, eye’s senior associate editor, says it wasn’t until Kozmosis was already underway that he realized that Koz was a brand of cigarettes. But, he says, his 18-to-34-year-old readership is too sophisticated to take issue with corporate sponsorship. That’s the domain of the over-35 set, he says.

Is there a chance that the intended target for Koz could be turned off or offended that a major tobacco company is trying to infringe on its territory?

Twenty-three year old Tony Elston of Snug Industries, one of the featured designers in Kozmosis, isn’t bothered by it.

‘Banks aren’t going to give money to do these kinds of things,’ he says, adding, ‘We had our doubts, because it goes against what we believe but they were willing to give us money to promote our product. We could have the show we always wanted to have but could never afford. And they were willing to not put their logo on anything other than a couple of banners…which no one really noticed.’

Scott Ciniello of Toronto’s Geek Boutique, another featured designer, says the clothing companies involved are not naive when it comes to corporate marketing.

‘Without large corporations, where are we going to get the cash for cultural events?’ he asks, careful to note that Geek Boutique is not promoting cigarettes. ‘We’re promoting a certain way of life, a certain culture,’ he says.