Tobacco Company Ads Back on UK TV after 20 Years

Source from:  Financial Times 02/17/2014

"Big Tobacco" is coming back to a screen near you.

An advert from a large tobacco company will appear on British TV screens for the first time in more than two decades when British American Tobacco launches a campaign on Monday for its new e-cigarette.

Adverts for Vype – BAT's first foray into the rapidly growing e-cigarette market – will be broadcast on national TV over the next two months, nearly 50 years after cigarette adverts were first banned in the UK.

E-cigarettes have grown from a prototype to a $3bn product category within a decade. Some analysts say e-cigarette usage could overtake tobacco in developed markets within a decade.

But e-cigarette adverts have proven controversial, with some health campaigners arguing that they glamorise smoking and will lead to tobacco being "renormalised" reversing decades of health policy.

Professor Anna Gilmore, Professor of Public Health at the University of Bath, said: "While e-cigarettes could represent a real opportunity for public health because smokers would be way better off on e-cigarettes than cigarettes, there is also a danger that the extensive advertising of e-cigarettes, which look almost identical to cigarettes, will re-glamorise smoking and encourage uptake among young people again."

The Advertising Standards Authority has launched a full public consultation on e-cigarette advertising. "There is a regulatory gap here," said a representative for the ASA. "Advertising codes were not designed with these products in mind."

Tobacco advertising regulations in the UK are so strict that any product that resembles a cigarette cannot be shown, meaning that e-cigarette sellers have to think laterally about how they market the product.

Cigarette adverts on TV have been banned in the UK since the 1960s, while loose tobacco and cigar adverts were banned in the early 1990s.

In BAT's advert, a man and a woman are shown sprinting down a street before being propelled into the air by a puff of vapour.

Restrictions are looser in other media. While Vype will be advertised with the slogan "satisfaction for smokers" in digital adverts, the TV adverts will have the tagline "satisfaction for vapers", the nickname given for people who use e-cigarettes.

Des Naughton, managing director at Nicoventures, the BAT subsidiary that launched Vype, said: "We have created an advert that we believe markets Vype appropriately and responsibly for its target audience."

Health bodies such as Action on Smoking and Health have broadly welcomed the rise of e-cigarettes, which provide nicotine but do not contain the tars and toxins that kill.

Tobacco companies such as BAT and Imperial Tobacco are turning to e-cigarettes as their core tobacco businesses suffer from declining revenues as smokers across the western world kick the habit.

BAT will soon be joined in the e-cigarette market by Bristol-based rival Imperial Tobacco, which hopes to launch its own e-cigarette this year, as larger companies enter a market that has been dominated by smaller businesses.

Despite the growth of the e-cigarette, the $3bn industry is still dwarfed by the tobacco industry, which is worth about $700bn. Enditem