Philip Morris International has exploited loopholes in smoking product advertisement bans in Israel, a new study shows, reports The Jerusalem Post.
The study, published in Tobacco Control, analyzes PMI’s advertising expenditure over four years across the general population, the ultra-Orthodox (haredi) public, Arab speakers and Russian speakers.
“We conducted a comparison among the advertising expenditures for all Philip Morris cigarette brands and the IQOS brand (a heated-tobacco stick that entered the local market in December 2016) in light of regulatory changes that restricted the advertising of tobacco products,” said doctoral student Amal Khayat.
Advertising restrictions led to a reduction in PMI’s marketing expenditures, but it exploited legal loopholes in the printed press, according to the study.
“Even after the law came into effect, the company continued to spend almost NIS3 million [$872,566.93] on advertising with a focus on the printed press,” said Yael Bar-Zeev, lead researcher. “While the law restricted print advertising to one advertisement in each newspaper, 40 percent of the IQOS adverts placed were giant, two-page ads, effectively doubling the product’s advertising space while still being considered a single advert as allowed by the letter of the law.”
PMI also used QR codes, allowing consumers to scan and view additional information. Before the law went into effect, according to the study, PMI significantly increased its advertising to the studied population groups, particularly the Haredi population, which previously had the lowest smoking rates in Israel.
“Our data shows that since the introduction of the IQOS e-cigarettes, 216 targeted ads were published, of which 55 percent were created for the Haredi public, 6 percent for the Arab public and the rest for the Russian-speaking public,” said Bar-Zeev. For regular cigarette brands, 87 percent of advertisements were targeted at the Haredi population.
“We expected that the company would focus on populations with the highest rates of smoking in Israel—Arab men—and not on the population that had hardly any smokers,” said Bar-Zeev.
Following the study, the 24th Knesset decided to remove the printed press advertisement exception but deferred implementation for seven years. In the interim, coupons, QR codes and advertisements featuring cigarette packs that do not have mandatory plain packaging are banned in the printed press.