Tobacco Promotion and Advertising

The Tobacco industry spends billions of pounds worldwide advertising and promoting tobacco products, which encourages young people to start smoking and reinforces the message, that smoking is cool, fashionable and social.

Tobacco Advertising:

• Encourages young people to start experiment with cigarettes and they become addicted
• Increases consumption amongst smokers
• Reduces smokers’ motivation to give up
• Encourages ex-smokers to start again

Documents for the UK tobacco companies also revealed that they have been working with advertising agencies to target young people and spend around 100 million pounds on advertising and promotion of their deadly products.

In the UK, from September 2001 to August 2002 the tobacco industry spent:

• £11 million on press advertising
• £13.2 million on outdoor advertising, i.e. billboards
• £714,550 on radio advertising
• £106,253 on direct mail
• £78 million on sport sponsorship, £70 million of it was used to sponsor Formula One

However, under the terms of the UK Tobacco Advertising and Promotion Act, tobacco advertising in the print media, on billboards, direct mail ended in 2003 and sponsorship of sport ended in July 2005.

Despite this, tobacco products continue to be advertised and promoted through product placement in shop fronts, at point of sale, on TV, in Music Videos and in Movies. Research shows that since the 1990’s smoking shown in youth rated movies has more than doubled and young people are 3 times more like to start smoking if they see smoking in movies.