Cig makers may be astroturfing on YouTube -- study

Thursday, 02 September 2010 07:00 AM Ezra J. Lasay

Research published online suggests that the tobacco industry may be using YouTube, as well as other Web 2.0 media, in order to get around restrictions on tobacco advertisements and market their products to young people, reported BBC News.

According to the study, while tobacco companies have always denied promoting cigarettes online, because the internet is largely unregulated, and due to the absence of a global regulatory body on content appearing online, it is "an ideal forum for tobacco marketing."

The researchers targeted YouTube, as it has the largest share of the online video market. They searched for English-language clips containing any reference to five leading, non-Chinese tobacco brands, whether in images or words, after which they analyzed up to 40 of the most viewed videos that were returned for each search. The content they studied had been uploaded by users of the immensely popular video-sharing site, which gets over one billion views everyday.

The brands that came under scrutiny were Marlboro and L&M, which is marketed by Philip Morris USA; Benson & Hedges, which is marketed by both British American Tobacco and Gallagher; and Winston and Mild Seven, which are marketed by Japan Tobacco and Reynolds.

Astroturfing?

Of the 163 videos that were studied, 71.2 percent were found to have pro-tobacco content, while 3.7 percent were found to have anti-tobacco content, leading the researchers to conclude that the number of pro-tobacco videos were "consistent with indirect marketing activity by tobacco companies or their proxies." About 20 of the videos appeared to have been "very professionally made."

Most of the videos contained tobacco brand content, the brand name in the title, or smoking imagery content, and the four most prominent themes were found to be celebrity/movies, sports, music, and "archive," i.e., featuring archival material. The first three themes tend to appeal to a youth audience, said the researchers. One pro-smoking video had been viewed over 2 million times at the time of the study.

Marlboro was found to be the brand with the most dominant presence on YouTube, and the researchers wrote that this could be because of the comparatively more effective marketing of the Marlboro brand, hence making it generally more popular, "and/or because there is commercially driven placement of the videos on YouTube."

Ken Garcia, a spokesperson for Philip Morris, said that the company did not engage in cigarette brand marketing on YouTube. He said that the firm had even communicated with YouTube in the past in order to request the removal of material that infringed on their intellectual property rights, though Google, which owns YouTube, was unable to confirm this. YouTube did state that it does not "accept any paid-for tobacco advertising anywhere in the world."

Catherine Armstrong, a spokesperson for British American Tobacco, said that it was not company policy to use social networking sites, such as YouTube or Facebook, to promote their products. "Using social media could breach local advertising laws and our own International Marketing Standards, which apply to our companies worldwide," she said, adding that their employees, agencies, and service providers "should never use social media to promote our tobacco brands."

Disturbingly typical

In an interview with BBC, Amanda Sandford, research manager for Action on Smoking and Health (Ash), an anti-smoking group, described the findings of the study were "disturbing but fairly typical of tobacco industry activity." She pointed out that the move toward the promotion of tobacco online was an indication that the main market of the tobacco industry consisted of young people.

The researchers said that, given that YouTube policies allow for the removal of material that breaches copyright or is offensive, public and health organizations could request pro-tobacco content based on these policies. They also said that governments should consider applying the requirements of the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control on the Internet in order to reduce pro-tobacco content even more.

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