...But in the early 2000s, emerging companies promulgated a new way of getting hooked on nicotine: electronic cigarettes, more commonly known as e-cigarettes. Jackler has close to 13,000 items in his collection pertaining to this recent fad, and his research has revealed troubling similarities between the campaigns of old and the practices used today.
"[E-cigarette producers] ignore absolutely everything that was ever agreed to around combustible cigarettes,” says Jackler. His collection of e-cigarette ads is rife with such misleading and targeted messages that hawk everything from pseudoscientific health claims to kid-friendly bubblegum flavors and “back to school” sales. “You have pictures of doctors saying, ‘Use this e-cigarette.’ You have all sorts of claims in e-cigarettes that are the kinds of things that would have been forbidden. E-cigarettes show up on television and radio,” he continued.
Calling the industry an “unregulated Wild West,” Jackler bemoans the familiarity of the techniques he sees in the marketplace. Take the San Francisco e-cigarette startup JUUL, to name one, which advertises “delicious” flavors that promise to “deliver a vapor experience like no other,” all in the service of a lofty mission of helping adults to quit smoking. E-cigarettes’ inroads in disrupting the traditional tobacco industry seemingly would be good news to anti-smoking campaigners, and startups like JUUL capitalize on this perception. They proclaim on their website that they are “driving innovation to eliminate cigarettes.”
However, Jackler and others argue that that e-cigarette companies’ marketing campaigns carry much more appeal to adolescents – most of whom never may have considered smoking traditional cigarettes, and haven’t been subjected to heavy cigarette marketing thanks to new regulations. With bright colors, sleek design and fashionable millennial models, advertisements for JUUL’s high-nicotine product could easily be promoting the newest smartphone line.
“Very clearly, they do the same damn thing today as they did then. The messaging is very subtle, very carefully crafted. They target, in the same way, adolescents,” says Jackler. (UPDATE, 4/13/18: JUUL submitted the following statement via e-mail: "It is absolutely false that Juul markets to anyone other than adult smokers. We could not be more emphatic on this point: Our product is only intended for adult smokers. No young person, and no adult who is already not a smoker, should use our product or any nicotine product. All of our marketing reflects that position.")
