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Every document and picture tells a story: using internal corporate document reviews, semiotics, and content analysis to assess tobacco advertising

¹ Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, University of California, San Francisco, California, USA
² College of Commerce, Department of Management and Marketing, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada
³ Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, Department of Medicine, Division of General Internal Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, California, USA

Correspondence to:
Pamela M Ling MD, MPH
Department of General Internal Medicine, CTCRE, Box 1390, 530 Parnassue Avenue, Suite 366, University of California, San Francisco, CA 94143-1390, USA; pling{at}medicine.ucsf.edu

In this article we present communication theory as a conceptual framework for conducting documents research on tobacco advertising strategies, and we discuss two methods for analysing advertisements: semiotics and content analysis. We provide concrete examples of how we have used tobacco industry documents archives and tobacco advertisement collections iteratively in our research to yield a synergistic analysis of these two complementary data sources. Tobacco promotion researchers should consider adopting these theoretical and methodological approaches.

Abbreviations: B&H, Benson & Hedges; B&W, Brown Williamson; ITL, Imperial Tobacco Limited; LTDL, Legacy Tobacco Documents Library; PM, Philip Morris; UCSF, University of California, San Francisco

Keywords: corporate documents; tobacco; advertising; research methods; communication

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