Changing Adolescent Smoking Prevalence: Impact of Advertising Interventions

paid mass-media advertising to communicate with the U.S. public. The U.S. Congress has allocated $1.2 billion—$200 million per year for 5 years—to fund an advertising campaign to keep youths from using illicit drugs (Fairclough, 1999). The U.S. Census Bureau has, for the first time, used advertising to increase mail-in response rates to the dicennial census; its advertising budget was roughly $100 million (U.S. Census Bureau, 1999). The American Legacy Foundation (http://www.americanlegacy.org), which is funded by the national U.S. tobacco settlement, is overseeing an antismoking advertising and promotional campaign amounting to $300 million in expenditures per year. U.S. states are currently trying to decide if they should run state-level antismoking campaigns (Brull, 1999). Several states, including Arizona, California, Florida, and Massachusetts, have already begun multi-year campaigns. California spends roughly $0.40 per capita ($12 million) per year while Massachusetts spends considerably more, or roughly $2.33 per capita ($14 million), per year on campaigns (Pechmann, 1997; Pechmann and Reibling, 2000a; Goldman and Glantz, 1998). Many other states are currently trying to decide if they should run state-level antismoking campaigns and are uncertain that antismoking advertising will pay off in terms of reduced smoking prevalence and lower health care costs (Brull, 1999).