Tobacco industry response to counter-marketing – 5/26/11

Q: Idaho’s Project Filter has been working on a tobacco counter advertising campaign in Idaho with a local alternative newspaper and just recently found that RJ Reynolds implemented a stipulation in their contract that we had to be "X" number of pages away from their ads. We were running our ads in the page directly before their ads and apparently they did not like this idea and implemented this new stipulation. The Idaho AG's Office reviewed everything, and they agreed that it could be a violation of the MSA and have requested a copy of the contract between RJR and the local newspaper. Knowing that RJR has targeted alternative papers much like ours across the country, Idaho would like to know if others have done any counter-marketing against the RJR snus campaign. If so, have they run into this stipulation in their papers as well?

Background information: In March 2011, the Network for LGBT Health Equity reported on RJR’s Camel Snus campaign in their blog, providing examples of what state and community organizations can do to respond to the Snus ads. The blog posting can be found here.

A:

1. California: The California Department of Public Health does not have a statewide snus counter-marketing campaign but has run into publications in the past that made placement of anti-tobacco ads or articles difficult due to tobacco industry requests that may have exceeded standard industry practice. The California Attorney General Tobacco Litigation team investigated these practices and took enforcement action against RJ Reynolds in 2005 on the basis that they violated the MSA provisions related to placing ads in national magazines with large youth readership. Laura Kaplan was a key member of this team.
    
   Please note that when placing ads, we too request competitive separation to be a certain amount of pages away or in a different section from tobacco ads. Our requests, however, fall into less priority when compared to the higher ad revenue generated by tobacco ads.

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