otential first car buyers.(128)
Tobacco companies also have something of an imperative to attract new customers: since 18,920 Australians die from tobacco caused diseases each year,(169) and around 150,000 more quit smoking permanently each year,(170) it is essential that tobacco companies recruit new smokers in order to survive.
The inconsistency of the tobacco industry's argument has been exposed by the advertising industry itself. A former president and chairman of the Board of the world's second largest advertising agency has said:
In recent years the cigarette industry has been artfully maintaining that cigarette advertising has nothing to do with total sales. Take my word for it, this is complete and utter nonsense. The advertisers know it is nonsense, the industry knows it is nonsense, and I suspect, the public knows it is nonsense. I am always amused by the suggestion that advertising, a function which has been shown to increase consumption with virtually every other product, somehow miraculously fails to work for tobacco products. The industry only advances this argument to try to undermine efforts to restrict tobacco promotion.(168)More recently, an Australian marketing consultant has commented that 'it's time cigarette advertisers stopped the tripe that their advertising does not encourage people to take up smoking. Of course it does -- it is high quality advertising that does its job very well'.(171)
If advertising is simply competition between the companies for a larger share of a limited pool of customers, it would logically follow that in countries where a tobacco monopoly exists, there would be no need to advertise. This argument has in fact been put forward by one company executive(172) as a reason why bans have been enforced in some countries. However there are no bans in several other countries where the governments have tobacco marketing monopolies; for example South Korea, Thailand and Turkey: therefore the advertising in these countries could only be intended to expand the markets.
It has further been noted that since brand loyalty for cigarettes is so strong (only around 10% of smokers swapping brands in a given year), that it is unlikely that the tobacco companies would seriously allocate such large advertising budgets to the protection of such a small sub-section of their overall market.(130)
The evidence most commonly cited by the tobacco industry in Australia and internationally in support of their contention that advertising does not increase consumption is research which has appeared in a number of publications over the past decade, edited by Professor J Boddewyn and commissioned by INFOTAB (now known as the Tobacco Documentation Centre), the international tobacco industry lobby group. This research examines data from a number of different countries and concludes that advertising is not a determining factor in uptake of smoking among the young.(173,174)
A detailed critique of this research has been published in the 1989 report of the Toxic Substances Board of New Zealand.(129) In brief, the research was criticised because:
ð it gave no information on advertising expenditure before or after bans;
ð consumption and other data are not consistent with what is known from other sources; referencing is not clear on these points;
ð the presence or absence of advertising is evaluated without consideration of other consumption-determining factors, for example price of tobacco, per capita income, prevalent cultural or other attitudes, education programs etc.
The Toxic Substances Board concluded that the data presented 'were deficient and the conclusions simplistic, unjustified, erroneous and misleading'.(129)
Finally, there is some evidence that the tobacco industry itself does not believe its no-effect-on-consumption argument. In arguing against advertising bans in Australia, the industry has mobilised the support of its employees with the fear that advertising bans will reduce sales and consumption, thereby threatening their future employment.(175)
The 'legal to sell, therefore legal to advertise' arg