Indonesia's tobacco control law enforcement remains weak and has not regulated the total ban on tobacco advertisement, promotion, and sponsorship bans (TAPS). Meanwhile, mediated anti-smoking messages have been significantly found to reduce smoking prevalence in many countries, helping people to stop smoking and preventing new smokers. Unfortunately, the anti-smoking Public Service Advertisements (PSAs) in Indonesia is unable to compete with the extensive and creative cigarette advertising or pro-smoking messages in many media platforms. Messages encouraging people to stop smoking and delivering the hazardous effects of smoking remain spotty in terms of numbers and visibility, leaving people with limited information about the adverse effects of smoking. There has been little research literature looking at how people perceived the effectiveness of anti-smoking messages. This study aims to identify and assess the anti-smoking PSAs by #suaratanparokok. A content analysis is carried out to examine the perceived effectiveness of the #suaratanparokok PSAs on YouTube. The involvement of YouTube influencers and optimizing social media platforms are important in delivering the PSAs. This study provides insights and recommendations to warn people about the danger of smoking through effective anti-smoking messages.

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The number of smokers among women in Indonesia is increasing every year, even though smokers are predominantly male. In order to educate the public about the negative impacts of tobacco consumption, the government has produced anti-smoking Public Service Advertisements (PSAs) aired on television. The information gap about smoking hazards is due to lack of anti-smoking messages which is unable to compete with the extensive and creative pro-smoking messages in many media platforms. The way people use media for information-seeking, such as messages about smoking, dictates how they look for the messages and helps to understand how they encounter messages the most. By interviewing 39 women in Banda Aceh and Jakarta, this study presents women’s opinion about television and the media preference for searching and gaining information about smoking. The findings show that participants of the study prefer to obtain information about smoking through the media—online social media than through television, such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Line, WhatsApp, and non-media like friends and their doctor’s advice. Given the substantial cost of television health campaigns, the study findings can provide input on alternative media in communicating about the harms of smoking.

The prevalence of student smokers has been increasing in Banda Aceh City recently. The presence of cigarette advertisements near schools is believed to be one of the causes. However, there is a lack of study for this issue. This study tries to calculate the effect of cigarette advertisements around schools on the smoking activities of students. This research is conducted in the city of Banda Aceh with a total sample of 365 students. We use the Linear Probability Model to estimate the effect by assuming that smoking behaviour is a factor of individual, household and environmental characteristics of students. The result shows that cigarette advertising has a positive and significant effect on the smoking behaviour of high school students in Banda Aceh. The presence of cigarette billboards near the school increases the probability of students' smoking behaviour by 12.4%, whereas the presence of banners causes an increase in the probability by 18.4%. It shows that 41% of the samples are smokers or had smoked before with 37% daily smokers and 59% occasional smokers. Through in-depth interviews, this study finds that having a smoker father or brother as well as friend increases the willingness of students to be smoker. Therefore, the local government should undertake a policy to ban cigarette advertisements in order to reduce the students' risk of being smokers. The government must also promote the creation of smoke-free families to reduce the possibility of increasing student smoker rate.