It stinks!

[Robert]

Source

 

IS THIS the last frontier in tobacco marketing or simply a global stage for the look-at-me generation?

 

Thousands of videos of sexy, smoking teens are appearing on the internet phenomenon YouTube, possibly being posted by tobacco manufacturers to recruit the next generation of smokers.

 

A global authority on tobacco marketing, Professor Simon Chapman, of the School of Public Health at Sydney University, has accused tobacco manufacturers of hijacking YouTube by flooding it with videos of glamorous, smoking teens. Each day 100 million video clips are viewed on YouTube.

 

But as each legal avenue is shut down, Professor Chapman says manufacturers must explore "dark marketing", the tobacco industry term for covert techniques.

 

At least 27,000 videos are returned when smoking is typed into the YouTube search engine.

 

A digital marketing expert, Jean-Claude Abouchar, of Capture Communications, said YouTube's anonymity - users can hide behind aliases - provided the perfect cover for companies wanting to infiltrate the teen world.

 

"It's the perfect Trojan horse," he said. "They can upload videos of stars smoking in movies and call the clips 'celebrities' or add the actor's name or movie title to the video. And while that's not incorrect, it's a sneaky way of embedding their message that smoking is sexy or cool."

 

Each time a video is viewed users can rate it or send it to friends. "Effectively, they've got a worldwide sales force," Mr Abouchar said. Posting videos on YouTube is free.

 

Professor Chapman said: "If I was a tobacco marketer I'd be saying, 'It's not illegal; it's an international market and it's unregulated,' and it goes right to the heart of what I believe will be the future of tobacco marketing."

Disgusting habit.

[CJ Jackson]

Smoking models don't attract me, it just puts me off.