Cigarette Advertising is Dying

Published on August 20, 2008 9:10 AM

People who smoke are finding it harder to indulge their habit. Some years ago, territories and states have banned cigarettes from inside bars and pubs.

Now New South Wales begins to restrict the sale of tobacco in shops and joins South Australia and Tasmania in banning smoking in cars where kids are passengers. The reason is to improve public health and discourage young people from taking up smoking. Campaigners have welcomed the laws. It means that New South Wales in the first Australian state to remove tobacco from kids’ view in shops, said Assistant Health Minister Verity Firth. She also added: “And what it also means is that we’re now really up among the world’s best as the toughest jurisdictions against tobacco displays. The reason why tobacco displays are considered so important is that when you think about it, they are the ultimate marketing tool. You’re standing there as the consumer, at the checkout counter with your money in hand; the lure of the tobacco display behind the retail outlet assistant, and you’ve got it all there. What all research shows is that for intending quitters or recently quit smokers, it is incredibly difficult to resist that lure. That's where you get real impulse purchase and people fall of the wagon and back into smoking. It’s true that the tobacco industry weren’t supportive of these changes, but we were able to talk to them and we were able to say to them, it is our goal to drive smoking rates down. At the end of the day if you’re talking about driving smoking rates down, you’re probably talking about less cigarettes being sold and therefore less revenue from those cigarettes being sold. And that’s just a part of our public health program.

Public health advocates like Sydney University’s Professor Simon Chapman said: “Getting cigarettes out of display reduces that reminder to a lot of people that smoking around. I think the main message in all this is that in all the lobbying that went on about this package of measures, the only one that the tobacco industry was concerned about was the one about getting tobacco out of retail display. That should send a loud message about how important it will be, which is precisely why the Government's introduced it and why it should be congratulated. Generic packaging or plain packaging of cigarettes will be the next big issue. I’d like to see Australia to be the first country to do that, and the tobacco industry nominated plain packaging as their biggest concern that remain. If you take away the ability for them to brand products by only allowing packaging with the brand name on it, it will remove the last frontier for tobacco promotion.”