An e-cigarette marketing campaign titled “Vaping Saves Lives” has been found to be misleading and the advertising industry has been instructed not to run any promotions under that banner.
This comes after consumer Stephen Claassen laid a complaint against advertising featured by Brothers Vaping Lounge on their website. Claassen called on the Advertising Regulatory Board to compel the advertiser to remove claims made in the advert that promote “facts with insufficient data”.
The advert claims: “E-cigarettes are less dangerous than cigarettes but are equally effective at delivering nicotine. Levy et al estimate that if smokers switched to e-cigarettes millions of life-years would be saved, even taking into account plausible rates of non-smokers who start to vape.”
Claasen objected to this, submitting: “As vaping has its own set of health risks, I believe that this is misleading and targeted at younger individuals to sell more product.”
Contacted for their response, Brothers Vaping Lounge said: “I am currently talking and being advised by VPASA (Vapers Association of South Africa) as ‘Vaping Saved my Life’ is a harm-reduction initiative initiated by them and supported by all the members.”
When the advertiser declined to respond further, the ARB sought an opinion from the Vapour Products Association of South Africa (VPASA).
It clarified that the “Vaping Saved My Life” initiative was that of a consumer advocacy group that was separate from VPASA and had its own mandate, not directly affiliated or tied to that of the association.
According to VPASA, the advertised claims were based on a research paper titled “Potential deaths averted in USA by replacing cigarettes with e-cigarettes,” authored by 11 cancer researchers, statisticians and epidemiologists.
It was published in the 2017 journal Tobacco Control, said to be “an international peer-reviewed journal covering the nature and consequences of tobacco use worldwide”.
The term “Vaping Saves Lives” was explained as an extrapolation of many findings from research that showed that because vaping is less harmful than cigarettes, would-be smokers’ lives are “saved” by transitioning to vaping.
The research was said to be based on a comparison scenario in which a cigarette smoker switches largely to vaping over 10 years — with the harms of e-cigarettes compared with cigarettes and the impact on overall initiation, cessation and switching.
The finding is that the replacement of cigarette by e-cigarette use over a decade yields 6.6-million fewer premature deaths.
VPASA noted that it did not monitor the design and content of vaping advertising.
The Brothers Vaping Lounge affirmed its belief that vaping offers a means of harm reduction as a substitute for smoking cigarettes and would continue to support the “Vaping Saved My Life” initiatives aimed at promoting the benefits of vaping.
Claassen argued that a more truthful statement would be that “vaping saves smokers’ lives”.
The ARB found that the advert should not market vaping as “safe”, but rather “a safer alternative for those who already smoke”.
“The vaping industry is to encourage smokers to consider vaping as a safer alternative, and not to attract non-smokers to vaping as a ‘safe’ means of consuming nicotine. This interpretation is supported by the ‘Vaping Saved My Life’ consumer advocacy group’s stated mandate of promoting tobacco harm reduction through the means of electronic nicotine delivery systems,” the ARB said.
The ARB was not convinced that the advert communicated vaping “as an alternative to smoking”.
The Brothers Vaping Lounge was asked to remove or appropriately amend, with immediate effect, the advertising that gave rise to the dispute and ARB members were advised not to accept the “Vaping Saves Lives” promotion and to carry the mandatory warnings on advertised products that contain nicotine and are addictive.
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