This is exactly right. It was a way to get free advertising from cutting your advertising budget.
One, I remember a study back when cigarette companies were told they couldn't advertise on television that all major tobacco brands loved this because it meant they didn't have to spend any money on these types of ads. I'm sure there are versions of this all over the place in most marketing strategies.
Two, pardon my cynicism, but I'm sure companies model these things out and take action based on those models. No CEO is just like "yes, let's support a social cause." Randomly picking on a brand, but I'm sure Starbucks started flying a Pride Flag because it made sense to do so for the business.
It was a prisoners dilemma, where the whole industry could be more profitable by cutting advertising, but there was always an incentive to ‘defect’ and advertise your product.
The government banning the ads solved this problem for them.
Without a price change the government can’t benefit because the tax is proportional to the price.
So tobacco companies see a drop in costs, no change in revenue, which results in increased profits.
In the future the government could increase the tax rate, and try to force tobacco companies to drop prices to compensate, which could allow governments to extract the extra profits from reduced adverts. But that doesn’t strike me as the kind of behaviour governments participate in, a little too complicated and risky. Also very likely to have unforeseen consequences as it’s unlikely that every tobacco company was spending the same proportion of revenue on ads.
Not to say that tax rates didn’t go up. Just seems unlikely to be directly linked to the banning of ads. More likely they went up just because they can keep hiking the taxes until all the tobacco companies go bust.
(not making a statement about Tim Cook because I don’t know anything about his positions on gay rights)
Edit: Tim Cook has made numerous public statements in support of gay rights and being gay. My personal favorite: https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/24/tech/tim-cook-gay-apple/index...
https://www.cnn.com/2013/08/09/world/oprah-winfrey-racism-sw...
The bigger point is having money doesn’t stop discrimination.
Someone called the cops on Ving Rhames for sitting in his own house.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/actor-ving-rhames-said-...
*I get up, I open the door, there's a red dot pointed at my face from a 9 millimeter, 'Put up your hands.'"
Do they say to each other: "let's pretend we're doing this for a good cause and that it's not just to save money. Let's say this: ... to the public and our customers"
Or do they tend to keep pretending, also when talking with each other in private meetings?
In any case, this situation reminds me of the time when Google exited China and said they were leaving due to censorship concerns. The real reason for leaving was that Baidu had gained an overwhelming share of the search market. I think at the time of Google leaving China, they had less than 5% market share.
Being under attack (not just a verbal attack) by the government seems more of a concern. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora
There had been a long string of problematic incidents before that which didn't come into the public though. Frustration and anger about China had been rising for years, and there was a very delicate power balance between Larry, Sergey and Eric going on in which Sergey didn't want to be there, Larry was sort of indifferent (if I recall correctly) and Eric very much wanted to be there. So it led to a lot of tension. When the huge hack happened, it ended up tipping things in Sergey's favour. Probably the lack of ability to make progress in China against Baidu, due almost exclusively due to the PRC's playing-field-tipping incidentally and not Baidu's skill, ended up stripping Eric of most of his intellectual ammo.