Does E-cigarette Advertising Encourage Adult Smokers to Quit?

Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems (ENDS), of which e-cigarettes constitute the most common sub-product, are a non-combustible alternative to smoking. Only recently introduced into the US market, e-cigarettes have been aggressively promoted, and use is increasing rapidly among both adults and youths. Despite attorneys general from 29 states urging the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to restrict advertising and marketing for e-cigarettes in the same manner as for traditional cigarettes, the FDA refrained from doing so in its recent ruling. Currently, there is an extremely contentious policy debate concerning the regulation of e-cigarettes. At the heart of this regulatory debate are fundamental questions regarding whether e-cigarettes will draw cigarette smokers away from a dangerous habit or lure new initiates into tobacco use and lead to a new generation of nicotine addicts, with very little evidence to inform this debate. We shed light on one side of the debate just outlined and provide some of the first evidence on whether e-cigarette advertising on television and in magazines (which comprise over 90% of total media spending on e-cigarettes) encourage adult smokers to quit.

To preview our results, the answer to this question is yes for TV advertising but no for magazine advertising. We use extremely detailed information on TV viewing patterns and magazine issues read in the Simmons National Consumer Survey (NCS) and match this information to all e-cigarette ads aired on national and local broadcast and cable stations and all ads published in magazines from Kantar Media. The match yields detailed and salient measures of advertising exposure that vary at the individual level, capturing the number of ads seen and read by each respondent in the past six months. The NCS allows us to observe the same consumer information and characteristics as the advertisers, which minimizes the “targeting bias” that would result from ads potentially being targeted based on unobserved factors. Furthermore, in-depth information on media consumption allows us to isolate exogenous variation in ad exposure across individuals. For instance, even readers of the same magazine may be exposed to different levels of e-cigarette ads due to variation in their reading frequency and the staggering of ads across different months and issues, and similarly for viewers of the same TV program. Controlling for magazine and TV program fixed effects, we exploit this variation to identify how ad exposure affects attempted smoking cessation as well as successful quits vs. failures, and perform various checks to confirm that the variation is plausibly exogenous. We find that an additional ad seen on TV increases the number of adults who quit smoking by almost 1 percent relative to a mean quit rate of 9 percent in the past year. Results also indicate that most of this effect is due to an increase in the success rate conditional on attempts rather than to an increase in attempts. We draw policy implications from these estimates and evaluate potential welfare effects resulting from stricter standards placed on e-cigarette marketing.