Tobacco advertising bans do help lower odds of smoking, study shows

Bans on tobacco advertising and promotion led to 20 per cent lower odds of people smoking and a 37 per cent reduced risk of people starting to smoke, according to a new meta-analysis that the authors say provides further evidence that these bans can influence people’s behaviour.

Researchers from Australia analysed 16 studies on the topic through April 2024 that involved around half a million participants and published their findings on Tuesday in the journal Tobacco Control. 

Tobacco advertising, promotion, and sponsorship (TAPS) bans are included by the World Health Organization (WHO) in the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC).

According to a 2023 WHO report, these bans remain “under-adopted” yet 66 countries “are covered by best-practice TAPS bans”.

Direct and indirect advertising or promotion of tobacco, such as at places where it is sold, has been linked to young people picking up smoking or to a person continuing to smoke, studies have found.

Tobacco smoking is the most significant cause of premature death in the European Union and kills some 700,000 people per year. 

Globally, it is a leading cause of preventable death and caused an estimated 7.7 million deaths in 2019.

The new analysis found no link, however, between the bans and smoking cessation, which may have been due to the small number of studies on it or the high number of people dropping out of them.

‘Advertising plays a crucial role in recruiting new smokers’

“Tobacco advertising plays a crucial role in recruiting new young smokers necessary to replace the adults who quit [or] die from smoking every year,” Hazel Cheeseman, chief executive of the UK charity Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), said in an e-mail to Euronews Health, adding that these companies fight to oppose advertising restrictions and find loopholes in laws.

“In the UK, comprehensive advertising restrictions have led to big drops in uptake of smoking among teenagers,” she said, adding that upcoming restrictions on marketing for vape companies will reduce young people’s uptake of vaping.

In the WHO European region, which includes parts of central Asia, just 13 out of 53 countries have completely banned the promotion and advertising of tobacco products, according to an updated WHO fact sheet from last month.

An estimated 179 million adults and four million adolescents aged 13 to 15 currently use tobacco in the region, WHO’s European regional office said.

Dr Gauden Galea, strategic advisor to the regional director and head of the special initiative on non-communicable diseases and innovation at WHO Europe, said in a statement last month that “high prevalence of tobacco use is fuelled by powerful industry influence, aggressive marketing tactics, and policy gaps that undermine public health efforts”.

Galea added that if countries continue as usual, the region will have the highest tobacco use rate in the world by 2030.

The Secretariat of the WHO FCTC added in a statement to Euronews Health that countries’ bans “must be comprehensive, as partial bans have little or no effect and allow tobacco companies to exploit legal loopholes or shift their investments to forms of promotion that are not banned”.

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The new study’s authors said that their findings reinforced the need for countries to implement and enforce bans on tobacco advertising, promotion, and sponsorship.

Cheeseman echoed this in an e-mail, saying: “The nearly 20-year-old WHO treaty on tobacco requires advertising restrictions, but there remain countries that are yet to fully implement these leaving their populations unprotected while tobacco companies continue to promote smoking in the pursuit of profits”.