Oregon State University researchers have found that tobacco company-sponsored anti-smoking advertisements aimed at the youth not only have no negative effect on teen smoking, they may actually encourage youngsters to smoke.

The study shows that tobacco industry-sponsored prevention ads aimed at parents often have harmful effects on students, also increasing their likelihood of smoking.“We suspected this the minute we saw the kind of ads the tobacco companies were creating. Their objective is to get customers, not to stop customers from finding them,” said Brian Flay, a professor in the Department of Public Health at Oregon State University.

Flay was one of nine researchers from “Bridging the Gap,” a policy research program based at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Michigan, who worked on this study, which is the first to examine how youths are affected by parent-targeted ads sponsored by the tobacco industry.

More than 100,000 students in their 8th, 10th and 12th grades were surveyed to assess the relationship between exposure to tobacco-company prevention advertising and youth smoking-related beliefs, intentions and behaviours.

Each additional youth-targeted prevention ad viewed by a student resulted in a 3 percent stronger intention among all students to smoke in the future.

There was a 12 percent increase in the likelihood that 10th- and 12th-grade students would become smokers if they watched prevention ads targeted at their parents.

The study appears in the December issue of American Journal of Public Health.

Tags: Anti-smoking, quit-smoking, smoke, smokers, smoking, smoking-adverts, stop-smoking, teenage-smokers