See ad, kick the habit?
CAN a sheet of glossy paper alone help you quit smoking?
Yes, if it appears in a magazine and advertises a gum, pill, patch or device designed to help smokers kick the tobacco habit.
Just seeing magazine ads for smoking-cessation products appears to make cigarette smokers more likely to try quitting -- and to succeed in doing so -- even if the consumers viewing the ads don’t go out and buy the products, a study has found.
Alan Mathios, a professor of policy analysis and management at Cornell University, said the advertising of smoking-cessation products appears to have “important ‘spillover effects,’ ” possibly reinforcing the anti-smoking message of public health officials and then stiffening the resolve of those who continue to see the ads in magazines after they’ve quit.
“The public-health returns to smoking-cessation product advertisements exceed the private returns to the manufacturers,” wrote Mathios and three colleagues from Cornell in the August issue of the Journal of Political Economy. If the average smoker saw slightly more than two additional magazine ads a year, it would cost the makers of smoking-cessation products $2.6 million more -- about 10% more than they now spend on advertising.
That additional investment might not generate much in the way of increased sales, but Mathios and colleagues calculated that it would help prompt 80,000 more smokers to kick the habit.
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