Today I read that ministers have blocked a proposal from Labour’s former health secretary (Frank Dobson) who wanted to force these manufacturers into submitting detailed figures on their marketing and research spend to the Dept of Health every 3 months. This was put forward as part of an amendment to the Health bill and it would also outlaw point-of-sale ads and vending machines, extending the 2002 law banning press and poster ads. Basically it means that manufacturers would have to detail their online marketing spend, any trade press adverts and brand development costs and these would be published. It’s thought that these would eventually be used to help limit spend on promotions for tobacco agencies even further.
To be fair, if you look at some of the old tobacco ads, Hamlet cigars, the Marlboro man, Silk Cut, they were considered really creative at the time, and often feature in any top 50-countdown program on ads that e4 likes to throw out now and then. But its been seven years since Labour passed the Tobacco Advertising and Promotion Act, and the days of this kind of above the line advertising for tobacco products is long gone. But marketing on the whole is getting more and more creative (especially with the boom in digital marketing) so if that ban wasn’t in place I’m sure there would be plenty more interesting and engaging methods of grabbing a consumer and hooking em in to the habit.
Dobson preached about the increased creativity in marketing cigarettes over the years to bypass the ban, claiming that the Government was continually "playing catch-up with the latest scams". I’m sure that giving them access to the digital realm will only be adding to their ability to be sneaky and bypass the ban in clever ways.
So I kind of agree; more stringent measures do need to be in place.
But alas, nothing has come of his proposals: health minister Gillian Merron ‘appreciated the sentiment’ but couldn’t accept them due to the burdens it would put on those businesses concerned including issues of confidentiality, proportionality and effectiveness.
Now I’m not a business-minded person and find it hard to see the big picture here, but surely transparency with costs is a good thing on the whole? Wont it lead to better understanding of market/consumer behaviours etc? if the measures for the stats to be submitted were regulated properly then surely issues of confidentiality shouldn’t be an issue either? Pffft I don’t really understand business-related issues so maybe its not a place I should be meddling.
End of the day though, I think that smoking=bad and as many measures should be taken as possible to stop the tobacco agencies marketing themselves to new generations of consumers, increasing the threat of lung cancer across our population.
(-rant over-)
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