Advertisements For E-Cigarettes Might Make You Want To Smoke Tobacco Ones, Study Shows

The verdict's not yet out on whether or not e-cigarette's are safe. However, new findings published in the journal Health Communications shows that advertisements for them may actually be enticing current and even former tobacco smokers to pick up another cigarette.

For the study, researchers examined over 800 daily, intermittent and former smokers who watched e-cigarette advertising and who were then required to take a survey in order to determine smoking urges, behaviors and intentions.

A standard test to measure the urge to smoke a cigarette showed that daily tobacco cigarette use and who watched e-cigarette advertisements with someone inhaling or holding an e-cigarette or vaping were more likely to have a greater urge to smoke than regular smokers who did not see the vaping. Similar results were seen in former smokers who watched e-cigarette advertisements with vaping and had less confidence, refraining 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 researcher Erin K. Maloney, Ph.D. of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, in a news release. "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."

Next, the researchers 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, with visuals that were replaced via scrolling text of the advertisement or simply answering a series of unrelated media use via questions that took about the same time it took to view the advertisements. All participants involved were either "daily," "Intermittent" or "former" smokers.

They found that more daily smokers who viewed the vaping ads smoked a tobacco cigarette during the experiment than daily smokers who viewed ads without vaping and daily smokers who did not view ads. 

"Given the sophistication of cigarette marketing in the past and the exponential increase in advertising dollars allotted to e-cigarette promotion in the past year, it should be expected that advertisements for these products created by big tobacco companies will maximize smoking cues in their advertisements, and if not regulated, individuals will be exposed to much more e-cigarette advertising on a daily basis," the researchers concluded.