E-cigarette ads may fuel urge to smoke

Television advertisements for e-cigarettes may be enticing current and even former tobacco smokers to reach for another cigarette, a new study has found.
Researchers Erin K Maloney and Joseph N Cappella from the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication studied more than 800 daily, intermittent, and former smokers who watched e-cigarette advertising, and who then took a survey to determine smoking urges, intentions, and behaviours.
Using a standard test to measure the urge to smoke a cigarette, people who smoke tobacco cigarettes daily and who watched e-cigarette advertisements with someone inhaling or holding an e-cigarette (vaping) showed a greater urge to smoke than regular smokers who did not see the vaping.

Former smokers who watched e-cigarette advertisements with vaping had less confidence that they could refrain from smoking tobacco cigarettes than former smokers seeing e-cigarette ads without vaping.
"We know that exposure to smoking cues such as visual depictions of cigarettes, ashtrays, matches, lighters, and smoke heightens smokers' urge to smoke a cigarette, and decreases former smokers' confidence in their ability to refrain from smoking a cigarette," said Maloney.
"Because many e-cigarette brands that have a budget to advertise on television are visually similar to tobacco cigarettes, we wanted to see if similar effects can be attributed to e-cigarette advertising," Maloney said.

Maloney and Cappella pulled together more than a dozen e-cigarette advertisements via searches of Google, YouTube, and e-cigarette web sites.

They set up three conditions for the participants - watching the advertisements, watching the advertisements with only the audio (the visuals were replaced by scrolling text of the advertisement), or simply answering a series of unrelated media use questions that took approximately the same amount of time it would take to view the advertisements.
Participants were "daily," "intermittent," or "former" smokers.
The researchers observed a trend that more daily smokers who viewed ads with vaping smoked a tobacco cigarette during the experiment than daily smokers who viewed ads without vaping and daily smokers who did not view ads.

Over 35 per cent of the daily smokers in the condition that showed vaping reported having a tobacco cigarette during the study versus 22 per cent of daily smokers who saw ads without vaping, and about 23 per cent of daily smokers who did not see any advertising.
The study was published in the journal Health Communication.