smoking and advertising to youngsters

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kiryan
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smoking and advertising to youngsters

Postby kiryan » Mon Mar 15, 2010 11:19 pm

This article is about a doubling in statistics of underage girls who could identify their favorite brand of cigarette ads after a particular ad campaign (from 11% to 22%). 50% of girls who can identify a "favorite" cigarette brand are likely to begin smoking. Given the ban on advertising cigarettes to children this could be a big problem for tobacco companies. The cigarette company claims it was a brand of cigarettes designed and marketed to adult women and they didn't market it to kids. Of course the anti smoking folks are skeptical.

My question is... how the hell are you supposed to market a product to women, but be able to some how keep young girls from being caught up. How are you supposed to differentiate marketing to an 19 yo vs a 17 yo. This is crazy. It's almost as stupid as when medicaid auditors asked me what I was doing to make sure that the state provided unique patient IDs were unique people and not mistakes made by the state.... seriously they wanted to know what I was going to do about it.

http://pagingdrgupta.blogs.cnn.com/2010 ... /?hpt=Sbin

The controversial ads were for R.J. Reynold's Camel No. 9 cigarettes. The ads, which were featured in popular women’s magazines like Glamour, Lucky and Vogue back in 2007, look a lot like the pages of a glitzy fashion magazine. The cigarettes are featured right alongside a beautiful dress, shoes, jewelry and a purse - the kinds of items that you might expect teen girls to find glamorous and appealing.

Pierce, however, says the damage has been done. He estimates Camel's ad campaign may have influenced 174,000 underage girls to start smoking.
Botef
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Re: smoking and advertising to youngsters

Postby Botef » Tue Mar 16, 2010 2:13 am

I actually on some points agree with you on the advertising aspect, be it tobacco or alcohol. On that same tip, I really wouldn't put much weight in ads directly leading to smoking. That is a pretty big leap with out a lot to back it up aside from product recognition. I'm not a woman, but I could probably identify brands of menstrual products with considerable accuracy despite me having no use for them. In other words, just because you can identify a brand doesn't mean its a temptation to use it be it maxi pads or tough actin' tanactin. A youth could just as easily identify with a brand their parents partake in - in fact I'd wager more underage smokers pick a brand based on their parents/family/friends preference than an advertisement in a glamor magazine. I smoked in High School, and I can tell you my decision to smoke, and the brand I chose, revolved around my peers preferences and the older kids who indoctrinated me to that clique - not some glitzy advertisement (despite there being numerous advertisements in Playboy mags for menthol's, which I never smoked).

From another angle, what happened to personal responsibility and parents assuring their children are not reading material they should not be? I don't think I'd let an underage daughter subscribe to Glamor or Vogue given the sexual nature of many of the articles even before taking alcohol and tobacco ads into consideration.
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Re: smoking and advertising to youngsters

Postby Corth » Tue Mar 16, 2010 3:49 am

I agree Kiryan. If you market to young adult women, you are by default marketing to teen girls. They read the same magazines, watch the same TV programs, etc. To that extent, it is hypocritical to tell the cigarette manufacturers they are entitled to market themselves to young women but not teen girls. How the hell are they supposed to differentiate between the two?!

That all being said, from a reality perspective, the whole point of cigarette advertising is to appeal to teenagers. People become smokers in their teens, and they usually choose a brand and stick with it forever. It is not worth the advertising dollars to try and convince people to switch brands. So really when you advertise you are trying to buy a new smoker who will patronize your band forever. The only reason they would spend that kind of money is to make teenagers smoke their brand when the time comes that they decide to start smoking.

If this is offensive to society, which I'm sure it is, then the less hypocritical approach would simply be to ban cigarette marketing.
kiryan
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Re: smoking and advertising to youngsters

Postby kiryan » Tue Mar 16, 2010 3:55 am

You know I was thinking the exact same thing about the magazines those kids were reading... if they contain cigarette advertisements are they appropriate for kids? If as a parent you are against smoking, then you probably ought not let them have magazines like that in the first place.

On the other hand, advertising is very powerful and persuasive by design. I don't think its even a matter of debate whether it has an effect on our purchasing whether we are conscious to the intent or blissfully ignorant of the manipulation... Is it fair to unleash that on children? There was a study that showed kids thought a hamburger in a McDonald's wrapper tasted better than the same hamburger in a brown wrapper. Is a psychological addicition less valid than a physical one? Both are an addiction and can be hard to break.

The question they asked was what is your favorite brand of cigarette. The salient point is whether or not the girls could/would identify a brand (presumably there was a I don't know option). Regardless of the intellectual or practical validity of the question, they've been using it a long time and statistically analyzed the responses to come up with something that can be measured over time and used to infer trends. This time its a 50% chance to begin smoking which concerns them especially when an ad campaign generates a 100% increase in young girls in 1 year.

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