Do Nicotine Pouches Target Youth Users?

What’s that familiar sound I hear? Oh, yes, it’s the noise of hand wringing from the usual suspects trying to warn us about the ghastly Big Tobacco plot to hook a generation of children on nicotine.

But what’s really going on here? Are nicotine pouch companies consciously targeting youths? 

Let’s try to explore the question.

Headline-grabbing claims

A few weeks ago, The Guardian and other outlets ran what amounted to a press release from The Campaign For Tobacco-Free Kids, a Bloomberg partner and political lobbying group. 

Per OpenSecrets, here is a look at the annual lobbying from this group in recent years.

Now, some of you might note the absurdity of a tobacco-free group increasing their lobbying efforts at the same time as youth smoking is becoming a problem of the past in the US.

Per the below graphic, youth smoking in the US is at an all-time low of 1.8%. Or, in other words, they’re “tobacco-free” already.

So, you might ask, why are they increasing their lobbying spending? Well, let’s look for some clues in the report from a few weeks back called #SponsoredByBigTobacco.

The report starts out by saying that vape and nicotine pouch ads have been seen 3.4 billion times on social media by “young people.” They then tell us that it amounts to 384 million global citizens. 

Then, the breakdown starts to get interesting.

They tell us that 40% of the audience is under the age of 25 and use a big red “150 million youth reached.”

But in much smaller writing, we hear that 16 million teens saw the ads. So, let’s run the numbers. 

Sixteen million out of 385 million is just over 4%.

Yes, “kids” are anyone under the age of 25 now, apparently.

Does this constitute targeting?

Now, I’m no marketing genius. But if someone asked me to target a particular demographic for a product and I came back to them and said that I’d run a bunch of ads and had billions of impressions, but only 4% of the ads were seen by the target audience, I’d like to think I’d get fired on the spot. 

Digital marketing is successful because it’s precise. It works because it can leverage user data to target tight cohorts. Sure, privacy regulations are making it less surgical, but if you have to use 100 impressions to hit 4 of your target audience without even thinking about them clicking on your ad, well, that’s just not efficient. 

So, it comes down to one of two things:

• Big Tobacco is really incompetent at advertising
• They aren’t targeting under 18s

Bizarro world business model

Now, the other thing is something I’ve talked about before, so I’ll just share a screenshot in the interest of brevity.

More shifting of terms

The Campaign For Tobacco-Free Kids understands the absurdity of its arguments. Kids are tobacco-free already, so they’ve had to engage in a quiet mission adjustment. Now, they are the Campaign For Nicotine-Free Under 25s. 

Aside from the linguistic trickery of their report, there is something overly paternalistic about recommending which product ads someone who can legally vote should see. 

Right there on their website, they state:

“Nicotine pouches are one of the latest products the tobacco industry is using to attract new users and keep people, especially youth, addicted to tobacco products.”

While I’m not saying that completely misunderstanding the difference between nicotine and tobacco is beyond The Campaign For Tobacco-Free Kids, I think they know what they are doing by mislabelling vapes and nicotine pouches as tobacco. 

Instead of having the integrity to acknowledge the role of vapes and pouches in delivering a “smoke-free” generation, they’re trying to convince people that there is a terrible problem happening, and they’re the only people who can help fight it.

It reminds me of Lisa Simpson’s Tiger-Repelling Rock. 

Yes, The Campaign For Tobacco-Free Kids thinks we’re Homer Simpson.