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Research paper
Associations between tobacco control mass media campaign expenditure and smoking prevalence and quitting in England: a time series analysis
  1. Mirte A G Kuipers1,2,
  2. Emma Beard1,3,
  3. Robert West1,
  4. Jamie Brown1,3
  1. 1 Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, University College London, London, UK
  2. 2 Department of Public Health, Amsterdam Public Health Research Institute, Academic Medical Center, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
  3. 3 Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, University College London, London, UK
  1. Correspondence to Mirte A G Kuipers, Department of Public Health, Academic Medical Center – University of Amsterdam, P.O. Box 22660, 1100 DD, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; m.a.kuipers{at}amc.uva.nl

Abstract

Background It has been established that mass media campaigns can increase smoking cessation rates, but there is little direct evidence estimating associations between government expenditure on tobacco control mass media campaigns and smoking cessation. This study assessed the association over 8 years between mass media expenditure in England and quit attempts, smoking cessation and smoking prevalence.

Methods Autoregressive integrated moving average modelling with exogenous variables (ARIMAX) was applied to monthly estimates from the Smoking Toolkit Study between June 2008 and February 2016. We assessed the association between the trends in mass media expenditure and (1) quit attempts in the last two months, (2) quit success among those who attempted to quit and (3) smoking prevalence. Analyses were adjusted for trends in weekly spending on tobacco by smokers, tobacco control policies and the use of established aids to cessation.

Results Monthly spending on mass media campaigns ranged from nothing to £2.4 million, with a mean of £465 054. An increase in mass media expenditure of 10% of the monthly average was associated with a 0.51% increase (of the average) in success rates of quit attempts (95% CI 0.10% to 0.91%, p=0.014). No clear association was detected between changes in mass media expenditure and changes in quit attempt prevalence (β=–0.03, 95% CI –2.05% to 2.00%, p=0.979) or smoking prevalence (β=–0.03, 95% CI –0.09% to 0.03%, p=0.299).

Conclusion Between 2008 and 2016, higher monthly expenditure on tobacco control mass media campaigns in England was associated with higher quit success rates.

  • smoking prevalence
  • mass media
  • campaigns
  • tobacco control
  • time-series
  • ARIMA

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-2017-053662

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    Footnotes

    • Contributors MK, EB, RW and JB designed the study. EB and MK conducted the analyses and MK wrote the first draft. All authors commented on this draft and contributed to the final version. MK is guarantor.

    • Funding The Smoking Toolkit Study is currently primarily funded by Cancer Research UK (C1417/A14135; C36048/A11654; C44576/A19501) and has previously also been funded by Pfizer, GSK and the Department of Health. MK is funded by a research grant of the NCSCT and a EC Horizon 2020 grant (SILNE-R, grant agreement no. 635056); EB is funded by a fellowship from the NIHR SPHR (SPHR-SWP-ALC-WP5) and CRUK also provide support (C1417/A14135); RW is funded by Cancer Research UK (C1417/A14135); JB’s post is funded by a fellowship from the Society for the Study of Addiction and CRUK also provides support (C1417/A14135). SPHR is a partnership between the universities of Sheffield, Bristol, Cambridge, Exeter, UCL and The London School for Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

    • Disclaimer The views expressed are those of the authors(s) and not necessarily those of the NHS, NIHR or Department of Health. No funder had any involvement in the design of the study, the analysis or interpretation of the data, the writing of the report or the decision to submit the paper for publication.

    • Competing interests RW undertakes consultancy and research for and receives travel funds and hospitality from manufacturers of smoking cessation medications (Pfizer, J&J and GSK) but does not take funds from e-cigarettes manufacturers or the tobacco industry. EB and JB have received unrestricted research funding from Pfizer. EB and JB are funded by CRUK. EB is also funded by NIHR’s SPHR and JB by the Society for the Study of Addiction. MK has no competing interests to declare.

    • Patient consent Obtained.

    • Ethics approval University College London ethics committee (ID 0498/001).

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

    • Correction notice This paper has been amended since it was published Online First. Owing to a scripting error, some of the publisher names in the references were replaced with ’BMJ Publishing Group'. This only affected the full text version, not the PDF. We have since corrected these errors and the correct publishers have been inserted into the references.