If I had been asked where the bulk of advertising money for the tobacco industry was spent, a week ago I would have said it was on print advertising. But I was surprised when the Federal Trade Commission issued two new reports identifying price discounts as the largest category of spending for advertising and promotion. According to these reports price discounting made up 78.2% of the total advertising and promotion budget in 2009 and 80% of the advertising and promotion budget in 2010 for cigarettes. For smokeless tobacco, price discounts made up 32.6% in 2009 and 21.4% in 2010. It is no surprise that the total number of cigarettes sold or given away has gone down. From 2008 to 2009 the total number of cigarettes sold or given away decreased by 10% and from 2009-2010 by 3%.
The trends we see in smokeless tobacco are also predictable (and in line with other reports we have seen recently that identify and uptick in the use of smokeless tobacco products). In 2009 the amount of smokeless tobacco sold or given away decreased, but then increased in 2010. What is surprising is how much money is being spent to lower the price of their product. Read More »
Two weeks ago at the Healthy Retailer Conference I had the opportunity to give a presentation about community organizing. One of the things that I shared with attendees was some data from the National Association of Convenience Stores. Every year NACS creates a State of the Industry Report to help retailers (and people like us!) understand what’s going on in the retail environment. At the American Lung Association in California we use this report each year to look at the sales and profits of retailers with respect to cigarettes and other tobacco products.
In preparing for my presentation I realized that the data told a bigger picture about what was going on in the retail environment, not just with tobacco. In fact, all of the top eight products in terms of profit were products that we were discussing at the conference – tobacco products, alcohol and unhealthy snacks and beverages. Here are the numbers: Read More »
Today Center’s Stage is guest blogging over at the Health DATAbytes blog at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, a blog about how to use data in health efforts. You probably know that we at the Center love our data and use it to move policy campaigns forward. But it’s interesting and fun to have this opportunity to step back and think about how much data we really do have, especially on a topic like tobacco retailer licensing.
Check out our blog post about using data to combat the common arguments against licensing. Hopefully you’re familiar with all of these tools! And check out Health DATAbytes for some interesting reading about data being used in other health efforts from childhood obesity to elder health.
–Vanessa Marvin
Did you know that The Center just released results from a new survey of California voters on policies in the tobacco retail environment? Check it out at our website here. Don’t have time this very second to browse through the memos and factsheets? Keep reading along for some highlights:
Read More »
Over the past few years it’s been easy to get complacent about tobacco retailer licensing ordinances. Not that they are easy, because they aren’t. But it’s not that often that there is strong opposition to the ordinances at council meetings. But that’s not true anymore. Recently the Neighborhood Market Association (NMA) has begun showing up to city council meetings and opposing tobacco retailer licensing and other retail environment policies. They had been active in their home base of San Diego, but now they are speaking out across the state, and one of the first places they appeared was the City of Fresno. Read More »
If I had been asked where the bulk of advertising money for the tobacco industry was spent, a week ago I would have said it was on print advertising. But I was surprised when the Federal Trade Commission issued two new reports identifying price discounts as the largest category of spending for advertising and promotion. According to these reports price discounting made up 78.2% of the total advertising and promotion budget in 2009 and 80% of the advertising and promotion budget in 2010 for cigarettes. For smokeless tobacco, price discounts made up 32.6% in 2009 and 21.4% in 2010. It is no surprise that the total number of cigarettes sold or given away has gone down. From 2008 to 2009 the total number of cigarettes sold or given away decreased by 10% and from 2009-2010 by 3%. 
