Does E-Cigarette Advertising Encourage Adult Smokers to Quit?

Abstract

Only recently introduced into the U.S. market, e-cigarettes have been aggressively promoted, and use is increasing rapidly among both adults and youths. At the heart of the regulatory debate are fundamental questions regarding whether e-cigarettes will draw cigarette smokers away from a dangerous habit or lure new initiates into tobacco use. We provide some of the first causal evidence on whether e-cigarette advertising on television and in magazines (which comprise about 90% of total media spending on e-cigarettes) encourage adult smokers to quit. We find that the answer to this question is a yes for TV advertising but no for magazine advertising. Our results indicate that a policy to ban TV advertising of e-cigarettes would have reduced the number of smokers who quit in the recent past by approximately 3%, resulting in roughly 105,000 fewer quitters in that period. On the other hand, if the FDA were not considering regulations and mandates that would likely eliminate many e-cigarette producers during our sample period, e-cigarette ads might have reached the number of nicotine replacement therapy TV ads during that period. That would have increased the number of smokers who quit by around 10%, resulting in an additional 350,000 quitters.

Information and sin goods: Experimental evidence on cigarettes

“…We note that, while the studies apply different identification strategies, our findings are in line with Dave, Dench, Grossman, Kenkel, and Saffer (2018) who find no evidence that e‐cigarette magazine advertising influences quitting behavior among the US adult smokers. The authors do provide evidence that exposure to television e‐cigarette advertising may prompt some smokers to quit smoking.…”

Association of e‐cigarette advertising with e‐cigarette and cigarette use among US adults

“…Bypassing these sources of potential bias, we applied the method used in Dave et al . (2018) [19] to construct a measure of exposure to e‐cigarette advertisements for each person in the NCS, by matching advertisement placement data from Kantar to respondents in the NCS based on the programs that they watched and magazines that they read.…”

“…However, less is known about the impact of exposure to e‐cigarette advertisements on population‐level e‐cigarette use and conventional cigarette use and consumption among adults [18,19]. Existing studies have only assessed effects on the smoking cessation [19].…”

“…However, less is known about the impact of exposure to e‐cigarette advertisements on population‐level e‐cigarette use and conventional cigarette use and consumption among adults [18,19]. Existing studies have only assessed effects on the smoking cessation [19]. As such, the present study seeks to add to the limited evidence on whether e‐cigarette advertising on television and in magazines encourages adult smokers to use e‐cigarettes, and how this relates to use of conventional cigarettes.…”

Who Is Exposed to E-Cigarette Advertising and Where? Differences between Adolescents, Young Adults and Older Adults

“…These studies have typically focused on a single population or age group, often with mixed results. For example, Dave and colleagues found that exposure to television e-cigarette advertisements was associated with cigarette smoking cessation amongst adults [24]. However, other studies have shown that e-cigarette advertising exposure is associated with increased urges to smoke cigarettes among cigarette smokers [22], as well as the use of other tobacco products including cigarettes, waterpipe tobacco, cigars, and polytobacco [25].…”