Advertising and Promotion of Tobacco Encourage Smoking Among Youth: Study

“Year-to-year variations in advertising expenditure within countries: there are many studies of this type, both for the UK and for other countries, particularly the US. Details of the analysis vary from one study to another, but the basic approach is to model the demand for tobacco products by relating annual changes in consumption to corresponding changes in advertising expenditure and in other variables such as price and income. Some studies have found that advertising has a statistically significant effect on consumption; others, including our own study, have not. There are several possible reasons for failure to find a statistically significant effect of advertising, including data imperfections and the inherent difficulty of identifying the separate effect of advertising when this is only one of many potential influences on smoking behaviour. Taken together, however, the studies point to a more decisive result. Because the studies differ in specification and data, a range of results is always to be expected. If, however, advertising genuinely has no effect on consumption, it would also be expected that the number of studies reporting positive and negative results would be much the same; in other words, some studies would show that advertising increases consumption, but others that advertising reduces consumption. In practice this symmetry is not observed; the great majority of results point in the same direction — towards a positive impact. The balance of evidence thus supports the conclusion that advertising does have a positive effect on consumption.”

Andrews and Franke6 conducted a meta-analysis of 48 time-series studies of tobacco advertising and sales, which covered the period from 1933 to 1990. Twenty-five of the studies were based on U.S. data and another 13 used data from the U.K. The weighted mean advertising elasticity was positive and significantly different from zero, meaning that higher advertising expenditures were associated with higher levels of cigarette consumption. These findings are especially impressive given a basic limitation of such studies — they assess the effects of the annual fluctuations in advertising expenditures, which “presumably relate to the least productive slice of expenditure, on the reasonable assumption that advertising is subject to diminishing returns.”5 One would expect a much greater impact from a total ban on advertising, or from a ban on a particular method or medium of advertising (e.g., billboards) — “which cuts away the most effective core of advertising”5 — than from marginal changes in total advertising expenditures from year to year.

In a 1989 review of 14 time-series studies, the New Zealand Toxic Substances Board found that 11 of the studies showed that tobacco advertising significantly affected national cigarette sales.7 The Board concluded that

“Advertising is directly related to the number of cigarettes smoked; increased advertising means more cigarettes smoked, and less advertising means fewer smoked…. The effect of advertising on cigarette consumption can be substantial…. [E]ven a 10 percent rise in advertising will tend to increase consumption by 0.7 percent, that is by 37 million cigarettes [in New Zealand] in a year…. Changes in cigarette consumption of this magnitude will produce significant changes in death rates. This can be deduced from the high numbers exposed to the risk, the intensity and duration of that exposure, and the high relative risks for smokers of a number of common and serious diseases.”7

IV. Countries with tobacco advertising bans have lower consumption (or slower increases in consumption) than those without bans

The New Zealand Toxic Substances Board commissioned a study on the relationship between tobacco advertising and tobacco consumption between 1970 and 1986 in 33 countries with varying levels of controls on advertising. The study, published in the 1989 report7 referred to above, classified countries into four main categories: those allowing tobacco advertising in all media, in most media, or in a few media, and those not allowing tobacco advertising in any media. Countries prohibiting all tobacco advertising were further subdivided into countries not allowing tobacco advertising for “health reasons” and those not allowing tobacco advertising for “political reasons” (i.e., centrally planned Eastern European economies that did not, during the study period, permit advertising of consumables, including tobacco).

The New Zealand study found a clear pattern between rate of change in tobacco consumption and the restrictiveness of controls on advertising. In countries allowing tobacco advertising in all media, per capita tobacco consumption increased annually by 1.7% on average. Consumption decreased on average by 0.4% annually in countries with partial bans on advertising, and by a similar amount in countries that had banned advertising of any kind for political reasons. Consumption fell annually by 1.6% on average in countries that had banned all tobacco advertising for health reasons. Furthermore, the study found that the percentage of young people who smoke had decreased more rapidly in countries where advertising had been totally banned or severely restricted, than in countries where tobacco promotion had been less restricted.

A later study, published in the British Journal of Addiction,8 used a pooled cross-sectional time-series analysis to examine the relationship among tobacco advertising restrictions, price, income, and tobacco consumption in 22 OECD countries from 1960 to 1986. (See Section V. B. below for a definition of “cross-sectional.”) The investigators found that tobacco advertising restrictions after 1973 were increasingly associated with lower tobacco consumption.

The “Smee Report”5 (mentioned above) reviewed trends in smoking in four countries that banned tobacco advertising: Norway, Finland, Canada, and New Zealand. It reached the following conclusion: