If you haven’t noticed, social media sites have become key vehicles for online tobacco marketing—aiming at potential users of these products—and sadly despite tobacco companies repeatedly stating that they are not targeting adolescents but those of legal age to smoke tobacco products, advertisements for various tobacco and e-cigarette products do appear when our teenagers go to surf the internet. So does this marketing effort make a difference? Soneji et al. (10.1542/peds.2017-2927) investigated this question by looking at data gathered in a national survey of close to 12,000 teenagers called the “Population Assessment for Tobacco and Health Study.” The investigators asked teens about their familiarity and engagement with online tobacco marketing at baseline and then a year later asked if teens had initiated tobacco usage over the past year, or had increased their frequency of using smoking products or their use of multiple products or had quit. When the authors controlled for appropriate confounders in comparing those who engaged in (or were familiar with) online marketing and those who did not, as you might imagine, those exposed to online advertising were more apt to initiate smoking, increase their frequency of use, progress to multiple products and were less apt to quit.
Do you ask your teen patients, especially those who have not yet begun smoking if they are aware of online marketing by tobacco and e-cigarette companies? If not, this study should light up your desire to do so. Consider even sharing the findings of this study with your patients with the hope it might make a difference in reducing the worrisome results shared in this important study. Better yet, perhaps we can all do more to advocate nationally and at a state level for better regulation of the online marketing sites chosen by tobacco and e-cigarette companies or at least encourage sites that have a high adolescent demographic audience to choose other products to advertise than those that promote smoking consciously or subconsciously online.
