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Brief report
Did limits on payments for tobacco placements in US movies affect how movies are made?
  1. Matthis Morgenstern1,2,
  2. Mike Stoolmiller3,
  3. Elaina Bergamini1,
  4. James D Sargent1,4
  1. 1Norris Cotton Cancer Center, Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, Lebanon, New Hampshire, USA
  2. 2Institute for Therapy and Health Research, Kiel, Germany
  3. 3Department of Pediatrics, College of Human Medicine, Michigan State University, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
  4. 4Department of Pediatrics, Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, Lebanon, New Hampshire, USA
  1. Correspondence to Dr James D Sargent, Norris Cotton Cancer Center, Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, One Medical Center Drive, Lebanon, NH 03756, USA; James.D.Sargent{at}Dartmouth.edu

Abstract

Objective To compare how smoking was depicted in Hollywood movies before and after an intervention limiting paid product placement for cigarette brands.

Design Correlational analysis.

Setting/Participants Top box office hits released in the USA primarily between 1988 and 2011 (n=2134).

Intervention The Master Settlement Agreement (MSA), implemented in 1998.

Main outcome measures This study analyses trends for whether or not movies depicted smoking, and among movies with smoking, counts for character smoking scenes and average smoking scene duration.

Results There was no detectable trend for any measure prior to the MSA. In 1999, 79% of movies contained smoking, and movies with smoking contained 8 scenes of character smoking, with the average duration of a character smoking scene being 81 s. After the MSA, there were significant negative post-MSA changes (p<0.05) for linear trends in proportion of movies with any smoking (which declined to 41% by 2011) and, in movies with smoking, counts of character smoking scenes (which declined to 4 by 2011). Between 1999 and 2000, there was an immediate and dramatic drop in average length of a character smoking scene, which decreased to 19 s, and remained there for the duration of the study. The probability that the drop of −62.5 (95% CI −55.1 to −70.0) seconds was due to chance was p<10−16.

Conclusions This study's correlational data suggest that restricting payments for tobacco product placement coincided with profound changes in the duration of smoking depictions in movies.

  • Media
  • Tobacco industry
  • Public policy

This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt and build upon this work, for commercial use, provided the original work is properly cited. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

https://doi.org/10.1136/tobaccocontrol-2015-052400

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    Footnotes

    • Contributors JDS and EB contributed to the designing of the study. EB was responsible for collecting the data. MS performed the data analyses. MM and JDS took part in the drafting of the manuscript. All the authors participated in the revising of the manuscript critically for important intellectual content and gave final approval of the version to be published. JDS is the guarantor.

    • Funding This study is supported by the National Institutes of Health (CA 077026 and AA015591). One of the authors (MM) was co-funded by a fellowship grant of the Max-Kade-Foundation.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.