Last year, US President Barack Obama signed legislation that gave the Food and Drug Administration the power to regulate tobacco marketing. This past June, the FDA exercised its new authority by banning tobacco companies from sponsoring sporting events and prohibiting outdoor advertisements within 1,000 feet of a school or playground. But while restrictions on cigarette ads in print, TV, and radio have been in place for more than a decade, the Internet is a largely unfenced frontier where the Marlboro man could potentially roam free.
At least, that’s the thesis of a new study published in Tobacco Control, a British Medical Journal specialty publication. A group of New Zealand researchers searched YouTube for the most-viewed videos related to popular cigarette brands. They analyzed 163 videos and found that 71% offered pro-smoking messages, often using celebrities, sports, or music videos. While they did not find any videos posted officially by tobacco companies, the authors point out that the relative anonymity afforded by YouTube means companies could be acting through proxies.
“The Internet is an ideal forum for tobacco marketing, as it is largely unregulated and there is no global governing body for controlling content,” the authors write in the paper.
By and large, most tobacco companies vehemently deny any aspirations to viral video stardom.
“We do not post any cigarette brand marketing videos on YouTube,” says Ken Garcia, a spokesperson for Philip Morris USA. According to Garcia, it’s quite the opposite&mdash his company has asked YouTube to remove a number of videos that they consider to be infringing on their intellectual property. Furthermore, Garcia says, in order to receive advertising messages from Philip Morris websites, you have to go through a process that uses both government issued-IDs and Social Security numbers to verify that a person is 21 years or older.
At the moment, there’s little evidence of tobacco companies’ direct involvement in posting videos online. The most popular “pro-smoking” video that the authors cite, “Ganja Bus”, is primarily concerned with a wackier form of tobacco. And when you search for cigarette-related videos on YouTube, the results are overwhelmingly dominated by vintage cigarette advertisements (including ones featuring the Beatles or the Flintstones), user-generated content that appear to cater to those with smoking-related sexual fetishes, and, of course, the occasional cat video.
Image by Conanil via Flickr Creative Commons