January 27, 2014
The ad and supporting materials are at http://www.smokefreemovies.ucsf.edu/ourads/ad_sfm97.htm
January 26, 2014
Cati Brown, Lucy England, Pam Ling and I just published "Tobacco industry marketing to low socioeconomic status women in the USA" in Tobacco Control,
We used previously secret tobacco industry documents to shows that tobacco companies focused marketing on low SES women starting in the late 1970s, including military wives, low-income inner-city minority women, ‘discount-susceptible’ older female smokers and less-educated young white women. Strategies included distributing discount coupons with food stamps to reach the very poor, discount offers at point-of-sale and via direct mail to keep cigarette prices low, developing new brands for low SES females and promoting luxury images to low SES African-American women. More recently, companies integrated promotional strategies targeting low-income women into marketing plans for established brands.
January 26, 2014
Silvy Petters and Anna Gilmore have published another excellent paper on how the tobacco companies work to manipulate the policy environment, "Understanding the emergence of the tobacco industry's use of the term tobacco harm reduction in order to inform public health policy," in Tobacco Control. Here is the abstract:
Objectives To explore the history of transnational tobacco companies’ use of the term, approach to and perceived benefits of ‘harm reduction’.
Methods Analysis of internal tobacco industry documents, contemporary tobacco industry literature and 6 semistructured interviews.
January 25, 2014
Another way that the e-cigarette companies (which are increasingly owned by the big cigarette companies) is that they are keeping Big Tobacco's tradition of using Hollywood to hook kids alive, The latest example of this was the high profile presentation of e-cigs at the Golden Globes, where Leonardo DiCaprio and Julia Louis-Dreyfus were featuring e-cigs.
The last time the Golden Globes featured e-cigs was two years ago. Last year the California Attorney General's office wrote the Globes' lawyer urging them not to allow ecig companies to use the Golden Globes to hawk their products. The Golden Globes complied and even sent a cease and desist letter to the ecig companies to keep the Globes pollution-free.
This year when the California AG made a similar request they were flatly denied. One wonders how lucrative the deal was.
January 25, 2014
Just as e-cigarette advertising is modeled on the most aggressive of old-fashioned cigarette advertising, the e-cigarette companies (which are, increasingly owned by cigarette companies) are mobilizing the same network of right-wing think tanks that the cigarette companies have used for years to push their policy agenda, often linked with the tobacco companies' development of the Tea Party and related groups. John Mashey, a member of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education's Advisory Committee, sent me a few good examples.
Heartland Institute (tobacco documents):
http://blog.heartland.org/2014/01/chicago-bans-indoor-use-of-e-cigarettes-heartland-institute-responds/