The company formerly known as Philip Morris wants to talk about risk. So, let's talk.

• Position: Between The Lines

This ad from "Altria" Corporation recently appeared in major magazines. We think it needs a little explanation.

Why just tell us her first name?

That's what emcees do when the woman is there for appearances, not real communication. It's what happens with game show contestants ("let's welcome Jeff, from Houston"), or fashion models ("now we have Niki on the runway"), not with people who have something serious to say. We wonder what Doreen would have to say about the risks of allowing smoking in the workplace, but we re not going to find out. If she were a doctor placed on the page to comment on the risks of domestic violence, we doubt that she would be identified just as "Doreen."

Pure abstraction: The new logo reinforces the corporate strategy of starting fresh with no psychological baggage. If there's any connotation at all, it's with modern art--as far as possible from the ugly realities of cigarettes and lung cancer. With its black, red, green, yellow, and blue squares, the logo recalls Piet Mondrian's "Composition A"--a painting one might find in an air-conditioned museum, not in a smoke-filled bar.

Yes, that's bad, but ... since the advertiser is one of the world's largest producers of cigarettes, we might also ask what does smoking cost businesses? A study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta (CDC), published in 2002, found that productivity losses from smoking cigarettes were over $81 billion per year. The ad neatly deflects attention from the fact that Altria's share of the smoking damage alone causes about 10 times as much loss to the economy as domestic violence does.

False. Data compiled by the National Center for Health Statistics show that "injuries purposely inflicted by spouse or other intimate" rank 9th among causes of injuries to women--accounting for slightly over 2 percent of all injuries. Motor vehicle accidents...