TV COMMERCIALS for e-cigarettes encourage smokers to quit, new research has claimed.
Watching adverts for vaping products on the small screen gives tobacco smokers the urge to ditch their habit, a report has revealed, and so successful is the marketing, a ban could lead to a 3 percent drop in quitters.
At present, there are four times as many television commercials for nicotine replacement therapies than e-cigarettes but researchers at Bentley University, the Graduate Centre of the City University of New York, Cornell University and the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded that an increase in vaping ads could lead to more smokers making the switch.
During the research, 25,000 individuals were asked over a two-year period about their current smoking status, whether they had tried to quit over the past year, what methods they used and how successful they had been.
Under current US law, e-cigarette commercials are not allowed to explicitly say the devices are less harmful than traditional cigarettes but a survey of adult smokers in Florida found 75% felt like quitting smoking after seeing a television ad for e-cigarettes.
"Our results indicate that a policy to ban TV advertising of e-cigarettes would have reduced the number of smokers who quit in the recent past by approximately 3%, resulting in roughly 105,000 fewer quitters in that period," the report highlighted.
"On the other hand, if the Food and Drug Administration were not considering regulations and mandates that would likely eliminate many e-cigarette producers during our sample period (2013 to 2015), e-cigarette ads might have reached the number of nicotine replacement therapy TV ads during that period. That would have increased the number of smokers who quit by around 10%, resulting in an additional 350,000 quitters,"
The research also concluded that while TV adverts for e-cigarettes were successful in helping tobacco smokers ditch their habit, magazine commercials didn't have the same affect.
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