July 14, 2016

Stanton A. Glantz, PhD

Tobacco companies only reported about half their product placement in movies to FTC

Jonathan Polansky and I just published “Tobacco product placement and its reporting to the Federal Trade Commission” through the University of California eScholarship initiative. This report compares the product placement activities by the cigarette companies between 1978 and 1994 that are discussed in the companies’ internal correspondence with what they reported to the US Federal Trade Commission. We found that only about half the activities were reported.
 
Our report also contains a list of the movies that appeared to have product placement.
 
This information illustrates the need for the FTC (and FDA) to act to at the very least ensure accurate reporting and to make sure that movies (and other entertainment media like video games) are not being used to engage in subliminal advertising for tobacco products.
 
Here is the Executive Summary:
 
The historical record strongly suggests that asking tobacco companies to report their product placement activities and expenditures did not capture all activity in this area.
 
This report compares expenditures for product placement described in internal documents from American Tobacco, Brown & Williamson, Liggett & Myers, Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds tobacco companies with reports the companies were required to submit to the US Federal Trade Commission in the “endorsements and testimonials” category of cigarette promotion and advertising.
 
During that time, in their internal documents, American Tobacco, Brown & Williamson, Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds, or their contracted product placement agents, listed 750 motion pictures as engaged for product placement, 600 of which were released widely to theaters (Appendix).
 
Substantial discrepancies exist between product placement spending described in the internal industry records and the spending reported to the Federal Trade Commission in the “endorsements and testimonials” category. Nearly half (47 percent; $2.3 million of about $5 million) of spending for on-screen product placement described in internal industry records between 1978 and 1994 was not reported in to the FTC in the “endorsements and testimonials” category. (It is possible that the cigarette companies buried this money in some other category on their FTC reports but, according to the FTC’s instructions to the companies, “endorsements and testimonials” is where product placement spending should be reported.)
 
At least $1.4 million of the documented spending (29 percent) occurred between 1989 and 1994, when tobacco companies reported no spending at all on product placement to the Commission.
 
While the cigarette companies stopped reporting any spending on product placement after 1988, tobacco incidents in US feature films increased over the following decade and a half, peaking in 2005. Tobacco brand display in top-grossing US films declined only slowly from 1991 through 2016, with a large spike in films with tobacco brands in 2005.
 
The FTC’s questions about product placement have grown more inclusive and specific since companies stopped reporting expenditures on this activity in 1988. However, the discrepancies identified in this memorandum, both before and after 1988, along with the persistence of tobacco imagery and brand display on screen, suggest that FTC needs to be more aggressive in enforcing reporting of tobacco product placement (whether branded or not) in films and other entertainment platforms, such as video games.
 
In addition, producers of films and other entertainment should be subject to a legally enforceable requirement to certify, if the facts permit, that no one associated with a production with tobacco imagery or reference, including tobacco branding display or reference, has received any consideration or entered into any agreement related to the tobacco depiction.
 
The full report is available for free at http://escholarship.org/uc/item/7kd981j3 .
 
This item is cross-posted from the Smoke Free Movies blog at https://smokefreemovies.ucsf.edu/blog/tobacco-companies-only-reported-ab...

 

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