A new media analysis of nicotine pouch advertising was published in the Nicotine and Tobacco Research Journal. Titled Sports, Gigs, and TikToks: Multi-Channel Advertising of Oral Nicotine Pouches, the pre-print is a collaboration between the University of Queensland and University College London. More specifically, it’s brought to us by Tianze Sun and Harry Tattan-Birch. Both are reputable academics involved in sensible research around nicotine and tobacco.
Indeed, Tattan-Birch’s last paper, Secondhand Nicotine Absorption From E-Cigarette Vapor vs Tobacco Smoke in Children, was perhaps the final nail in the preposterous secondhand vaping canard.
However, tobacco control, being what it is, will no doubt continue to trot out its illogical lies and claim the coffin lid is hanging wide open. The more conspiratorial among the group might even cast doubt on the existence of nails or woodwork itself, speculating that it was all just some Byzantine plot by Big Tobacco.
So, with accusations of Big Tobacco's dark arts flowing, it’s time to see what the paper is all about.
The study
The authors state that we should evaluate the public health impact of pouches by trading usage off against the number of current tobacco and nicotine users transitioning to the product. However, I think that we also need to think about the people who would have started smoking cigarettes in the absence of safer nicotine to get a fuller picture.
Yet, that’s not the focus of the paper. Instead, it’s a fairly straightforward look at how nicotine pouches are marketed. It examines “three key marketing channels—online media, sports sponsorships, and out-of-home advertising,” to see if the product is targeting youth or the nicotine-naïve.
Are pouches targeting youths?
The two pouches that come under scrutiny are VELO and Nordic Spirit. The researchers break down their analysis into the three categories detailed in the title, namely online marketing, sports sponsorships, and out-of-home advertisements.
I’ll examine them below.
Online Marketing
The researchers point out that both VELO and Nordic Spirit advertise on their age-gated Instagram pages. Then, they cite the WHO study group on tobacco product regulation, advancing the report's claim that both companies are engaging influencers to circumnavigate these age gates. However, fact-checking this claim led me down a bit of a rabbit hole. So here we go.
The WHO study references a report called Where There’s Smoke. Washington DC: Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, which is hosted on a website www.takeapart.org that is no longer accessible or active. When I entered it into the Wayback Machine, it showed that the content was added in 2019. But it gets more interesting.
The site, which you can find archived here, does contain testimonials from influencers talking about clandestine tobacco sponsorships. You can find that file here. Interestingly, the words “nicotine” or “pouch” are not present in these testimonials.
Then, there are the galleries purporting to show influencers' promotional posts. Again, there are no nicotine pouches to see, but there are cigarettes.
So, while this is suggestive of underhand behaviour for social media marketing of cigarettes, it might not fit the bill for nicotine pouch marketing. However, it does show the capability for deception, at least.
Otherwise, I wasn’t quite convinced that the paper made a great claim with its examples of youth marketing. For starters, they include this collage of photos.
Per the paper, “These accounts predominately display visually appealing images of nicotine pouches and young adults, often integrated with lifestyle appeals such as travel, sports, and music.”
What I would say is that they are ads on a photo-sharing app, so they are unlikely to use drab colors or 50+-year-old models, but I take their point.
Further, the paper looks at marketing that appears in:
- The Sun: 15-24-year-olds comprise 10% of readership.
- A FIFA video game fansite: The core demo is 16-32-year-olds.
- A crossword puzzle site: The core demo for crossword puzzles is 55+, according to an IPSOS poll from 2023.
The adverts are shown below.
I think it’s more likely that this is due to programmatic advertising rather than explicit targeting. However, advertising on the FIFA site is impossible to defend, so I won’t.
Sports sponsorships
When it comes to sports sponsorships, VELO’s advertising on the McLaren F1 car might be an issue. While the lion’s share of the audience is adults, youth viewership is growing. For example, 12-17-year-old interest grew by 50% between 2021 and 2022. Again, almost 40% of F1 viewers are 55 and over, but these are big global events that get a lot of eyeballs.
Additionally, the study mentions popularity among footballers and e-sports pros. However, their use does not constitute marketing or endorsements.
Out-of-home advertising
Out-of-home advertising, such as billboards, train stations, and convenience stores, is another complex scenario. As is the fact that VELO and Nordic Spirit set up pop-ups at festivals. Again, these are public spaces, and connecting with adult consumers in these forums is impossible without also getting your message in front of those outside the target demographic.
Conclusion
The paper is interesting, even if some of the examples don’t quite hit the bar for aggressive targeting or whatever the neurotic Puritans would have you believe. Indeed, as I’ve said before if this was targeted marketing, the conversion rates would be embarrassingly bad.
As the study suggests, the prevalence has gone from about 0.25% to 0.33%, with 86% of users being current or former smokers. If this is a tobacco industry plan, it’s a strange long game whose impact on public health is so minor that it makes the fear-mongering around pouches look positively unhinged.
