Join us in monitoring and researching the promotional activities of the global tobacco industry.
"In our opinion, [after taxation] the other two regulatory environment changes that concern the industry the most are homogenous packaging and below-the-counter sales. Both would significantly restrict the industry's ability to promote their products." Morgan Stanley Research (2007)
Welcome to the Tobacco Control Supersite
This site has two main goals:
- Monitoring how the global tobacco industry promotes its products in the age of advertising bans. Researching how new media may be undermining advertising bans and sharing examples to help build a global profile of how the tobacco industry is using the internet to engage with new and potential consumers
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To provide access to a wide range of information relevant to smoking prevention and control in Australia.
Background
The WHO’s global Framework Convention on Tobacco Control [FCTC] is the world’s first legally binding health treaty. Now ratified by 176 nations, among other requirements, it obliges signatories to implement a raft of controls which include prohibitions on all forms of tobacco advertising and promotion under the control of national laws. As orthodox “above-the-line” forms of tobacco advertising and promotion become prohibited through national legislative action, the tobacco industry has turned to a variety of “below-the-line” covert strategies centred on innovations in packaging, viral, buzz and stealth marketing. The reach of these innovative strategies has been incomparably facilitated by the mobile and internet communications revolution which is now routinely compared with the Guttenberg revolution precipitated by the invention of the printing press.
Any notion that tobacco control has now somehow “checked off” the problem of tobacco advertising and promotion via the international provisions of the FCTC is both ill-informed and myopic. Equally, the internet provides unparalleled opportunities for both pro and anti-tobacco interest groups to respectively promote and denormalise tobacco use.There is already an abundance of tobacco content in cyberspace, variously promoting tobacco use and brands as well as much overtly anti-smoking material.
The construction of this website is supported by grant 570869, funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council, Australia on the use of Web 2.0 internet sites to undermine tobacco advertising bans and to mobilise tobacco control advocates.
#2 site in the WORLD for "tobacco control" & #5 most popular tobacco control site on Alexa Site Maintained by Simon Chapman