Media Watch: Bloomberg News Excitedly Speculates About “Nicotine Pouches’ Downfall”

Nicotine Pouches, especially ZYN, have produced an incredible amount of column inches. It’s hard to keep up with all the think pieces, hand-wringing and attempts to tie pouches to conservatism, masculinity, or other “evils”. It’s also becoming hard to stomach.

Bloomberg News has another article on pouches, this time titled “Zyn’s Online Hype Risks Leading to the Nicotine Pouches’ Downfall.” It’s not the worst piece on the topic, but the central thesis is so absurd that it’s worth exploring.

In short, the writer speculates that despite explicitly not targeting youths with advertising, “decentralized, unsanctioned citizen marketing” could lead to ZYN going the way of Juul.

Let’s take a look.

Marketing responsibility

You’ll no doubt remember all the fuss surrounding Juul’s marketing drive in 2015. People lost their minds at the brand’s use of youthful models, bright colours, and social media ads, attempting to draw parallels between Big Tobacco’s 20th-century advertising tactics. Both then and now, these observations were a bit silly.

The main problem with Big Tobacco was that they were suppressing and manipulating research to mislead the public and policymakers. They knew the products were lethal but still happily engaged in marketing campaigns that glamorised and downplayed the adverse effects of the product.

It’s not credible to say that Juul or Zyn have done the same. Sure, they have advertised their products as safer than cigarettes, but that’s because they are categorically safer. Some people try to twist this into the suggestion that these brands claim that vapes or pouches are “safe”, but that requires pretending you don’t understand how the English language works.

Are good reviews bad news?

Per the Bloomberg piece, we’ve now reached an insane juncture where positive word-of-mouth advertising can hurt a product. That’s nuts. The beautiful thing about the democratisation of media is that people can receive unvarnished, independent information about things they are interested in. This dynamic removes control from the brand, meaning they are forced to sink or swim based on the quality of their product rather than the slickness of their marketing.

This would be a big problem if ZYN were paying for these influencers’ positive coverage. But again, they are not actually doing this. Instead, and it’s weird to have to spell this out, they’ve taken a uniquely dangerous product and defanged it so that we can enjoy the benefits with far less risk. The fact that this is treated as suspicious is wacky.

Have people forgotten how bad smoking is?

Another thing I realised while reading the Bloomberg article is that as smoking rates plummet around the world, it seems like people are forgetting about just how bad cigarettes are for health. Perhaps this is a consequence of anti-smoking groups losing sight of their objectives and instead placing excessive focus on vapes and pouches, to the point that the perception of risk between the products has been effectively dissolved.

We might now have a generation of people who haven’t really seen the destructive effects of cigarettes first-hand. No one should need a relative who died of lung cancer, a wheezing neighbour, or to have a cough you can’t shake for a decade to understand why smoking is a bad idea. But who hasn’t had to make a mistake to learn a lesson despite warnings from others?

Final thoughts

The Bloomberg article isn’t bad, especially when compared to the usual slop about pouches. But it has highlighted two important things:

Firstly, people are so paranoid about past Big Tobacco advertising tactics that even unauthorised user-generated content is seen as a stick to beat ZYN with.

Second, the harms of smoking have become distorted to the point that vapes and pouches are talked about as if they’re in the same kind of category. They’re not.

People are tired of ads and a media that doesn’t reflect them. Influencers and user-generated content will continue to grow for the very reason that ZYN is not accountable for this content: it can’t be controlled by corporate interests.