Article Text
Statistics from Altmetric.com
- Advertising and Promotion
- Surveillance and monitoring
- Electronic nicotine delivery devices
- Non-cigarette tobacco products
- Public policy
In early 2014, the nation's largest cigarette maker, Altria1 (formerly Phillip Morris Companies) announced the national launch of their MarkTen e-cigarette. Nu Mark, an Altria company, is behind the design and marketing of the brand.2 Altria is the last major tobacco company to join the estimated $2 billion market for e-cigarettes,3 following Lorillard's acquisition of the blu e-cigarette brand in 20124 and RJ Reynold's introduction of Vuse5 in 2013.
Using Competitrack, an advertising service that systematically collects data related to all top market US advertisements, we reviewed e-cigarette advertising expenditures for the year 2014 and examined the top two highest spending brands for the year (MarkTen and blu). Competitrak monitors advertising over 22 media sources, including network TV, national newspapers, cinema, radio and online, and includes advertisements and associated metadata of the media channel, channel-specific details and estimated expenditures for placement of ads.6–9 For online advertisements, Competitrack monitors …
Footnotes
Contributors JC, BE and OG conceptualised and wrote the article. BE analysed the data. ECH and DV provided feedback on the article.
Funding This work was funded by Truth Initiative (formerly American Legacy Foundation).
Competing interests None declared.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.