Скачать или смотреть Juul faces scrutiny over ad campaigns similar to big tobacco

E-cigarette maker Juul Labs has been a roaring success in recent years, becoming the fastest startup to reach a valuation of over $10 billion.

But the company has been accused of targeting minors in marketing campaigns eerily similar to Big Tobacco in its heyday and is facing increasing scrutiny from authorities.

‘He looked down and smiled, which I thought was very telling’
Research shows that Juul’s early campaigns heavily borrowed from tactics used by old cigarette companies — suggesting that even if the smoking device has changed, the pitch remains the same.

In January, a team at Stanford recently published a report that found that Juul’s “principal advertising themes … are closely aligned with that of traditional tobacco advertising.”

Researchers highlighted themes like “pleasure/relaxation, socialization/romance, flavors, cost savings and discounts, holidays/seasons, style/identity, and satisfaction” were being recycled by e-cigarette companies like JUUL in various advertisements.

This was a conscious decision by Juul co-founder James Monsees, they wrote, arguing that Stanford’s extensive database of around 50,000 old cigarette ads had been “quite useful” to the Juul team in creating the design of its ads.

Dr. Robert Jackler, the lead author of the report, told Yahoo Finance that when he had visited the company’s headquarters in mid-2018, he had brought the uncanny similarities up to Monsees.

“I said to him, … ‘Your Vaporized advertising had the same color schemes as American Spirit’,” Dr. Jackler recalled telling him, referring to the company’s ‘Vaporized’ campaign. “[It] looks like you ripped that off.”

To that, Monsees “just didn’t say yes or no,” said Dr. Jackler. “He looked down and smiled, which I thought was very telling.”

A Juul Labs spokesperson disagreed with this characterization, stating: “Dr. Jackler's characterization of his interaction with James Monsees is flat out wrong and JUUL has never modeled our marketing campaigns off of tobacco companies' advertising."

In a previous statement, Juul told Yahoo Finance: "We fully recognize that some of our earliest marketing initiatives did not fully reflect the mission of our company, which is to improve the lives of the world’s one billion adult smokers, with the eventual goal of eliminating combustible cigarettes.”

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