Vaping Advertisements and Anti-Vaping Campaigns

"The FDA campaign on social media, it's great that it's there, but it's not changing the trend of high prevalence of pro-vaping content [on Instagram]."
"The FDA campaign just becomes a drop in the ocean, practically, because it's so hard to compete with the enormous volume of pro-vaping advertisements."
"That's one of the dangerous things, youth are very susceptible to any type of influence that is so well advertised. Their brains are still developing, it's hard to resist. They want to fit in and they want to be cool. All the marketing strategies are so well crafted in the pro-cigarette message."
Julia Vassey, researcher, UC Berkeley Center for Integrative Research on Childhood Leukemia and the Environment

"It's really concerning because we're worried about a new generation of young people who could become addicted to nicotine."
"We have faith that society and government overall will put the health of young people ahead of the interests of corporation and we'll see regulation in the near future to protect young people."
Lesley James, senior manager, policy, Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada

A post from British e-cigarette Instagram influencer @elysiaalessia on the #vapenation hashtag page. elysiaalessia/ Instagram

E-cigarettes were originally marketed as a novel invention whose purpose was to help smokers break their addiction to cigarettes. It was advertised as a successful mechanism that, though using nicotine, was less harmful and would help smokers succeed in weaning themselves away from the infinitely more threatening habit of cigarette smoking. Since its introduction to the consumer market its popularity has risen exponentially, particularly among an audience not initially targeted; teens and young adults.

When manufacturers began flavouring e-cigarettes, their audience was definitely not mature adults. Teens were attracted to the fruit flavours, the catchy names and the attractive containers. And Instagram, a popular social web-posting platform, is rife with marketing advertisements, many of which show models and some celebrity figures soft-peddling vaping products. Awareness campaigns launched to warn young people and particularly teens of the injurious aspects of vaping languish in relative obscurity, against the huge proliferation of vaping advertisements.

The products still contain nicotine, a highly addictive substance known for its negative health consequences. The number of high-school students who responded to a recent U.S. National Youth Tobacco Survey, revealed their use of e-cigarettes over-doubled from 12 percent in 2017 to 28 percent in 2019. Repeated e-cigarette use has been shown through research to lead to lung and brain damage, spurring the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to launch a youth-oriented awareness campaign, The Real Cost.

Researchers from the University of California's new study published in Frontiers in Communication, analyzed hundreds of thousands of Instagram posts between 2017 and 2019 to determine whether the FDA campaign made an impact on social interactions with vaping. Lead author Julia Vassey explained that the study discovered the average amount of likes on pro-vaping Instagram posts rose in fact, since the FDA campaign began.

The UC Berkley team placed their focus on Instagram when they were informed from e-cigarette 'influencers' of their growing followers, with some of the influencers sharing their analytics data with the research team which then understood that around 15 percent of followers of pro-vaping accounts were of the ages between 13 to 17. Each pro-vaping hashtag published over 500,000 new posts monthly while #The Real Cost published a mere 50 a month in a like time frame.

Using a "deep learning" software, the research team analyzed over 40,000 vaping posts on Instagram enabling the identification of each image's contents, to discover that the most popular e-cigarette marketing posts featured female models using vapes or alternatively, male models doing tricks with the vaping products.

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In Canada, Health Canada advertises risks related to vaping on their own website, but in addition hosts seminars in high schools, engaging with teens aged 13 to 18 through activities. Where, since 2018, their advertisements on the dangers in vaping have also appeared on social media sites like Facebook, Snapchat and Twitch. After viewing ads from Health Canada's outreach program, 26 percent of youth responded they would stop vaping, while 72 percent of teens who took part in the in-person school activities stated they were less likely to start using vapes and more likely to stop if they were already vaping.

Its a steep uphill battle in a social media world inhabited by teens, where 11 million posts confront them on line, produced by e-cigarette marketing teams and influencers, purposed to lure them into the vaping market, when posts published to inform the same demographic of the dangers and risks inherent in vaping number 3,000. The odds are 10,000 to one, which goes quite a way to explaining how marketing has made such inroads in the youth population, while health regulators continue to explore avenues to counteract their advertising successes and help teens realize the larger picture and their choices, gambling with their health.