Juul had this radio campaign that was made up of 2 spots one after the other. The 1st spot would give you the pluses of the product followed by the warnings and how it was not for kids. The second spot would imply that what you had heard about Juul's minuses and warnings were false. They were not blatantly saying it but because of the way, the 2 spots were played one after the other you certainly got the idea. It was a bit surreal. It certainly minimized the minuses and warnings. In a way, it was brilliant since you could never prove that they were trying to undermind the warnings but it certainly had that effect. It's a shame they were using it to promote their products rather than a product that is good for you.
They have some brilliant marketing people working for them.
>>They have some brilliant marketing people working for them.
These people are not brilliant. They are utterly deceitful. To go along with this shit in this day and age is utterly contemptible. Imagine all the people and the planning and the brainstorming to come up with such a trick - how can any of them not feel really really bad and storm out of the room?
> it was brilliant since you could never prove that they were trying to undermind the warnings
actually, many times you can prove these things. produce the contract showing that juul paid for one ad to run after the other and they are really screwed. Or prosecutors who have a spine could easily just record the number of instances of the ads running together vs. separately and use that as evidence they are not intended to be separate ads. (It might even be possible to subpoena radio stations for their records that would show this).
Generally, judges don't take kindly to the type of "brilliance" that would be going into court and claiming "But they are two separate ads, so we weren't being misleading" if Juul indeed arranged for them to run one after the other.
> They have some brilliant marketing people working for them.
FWIW I hate people like that. If that's the best you can do with your creativity then you're no better than a scientist that works on chemical weapons.
It's not like they are bad people who set out in the morning to make the world a worse place. If you want change, you must question what makes people behave that way. The extreme focus on economic success of individuals combined with a lack of solid social security is what my intuition tells me drives people to do things at work that damage other people. Is there research about this?
They have some sociopaths focusing purely on making a buck at the expense of people's lives working for them, would be the way I look at. Brilliant marketing to me is just abusing our evolutionary baggage and manipulation.
My father went to high school in the 1930's, and cigarettes were called "coffin nails" at the time.
The first thing every doctor would advise sick patients to do was quit smoking.
Every doctor who autopsied a dead smoker could see how bad smoking was for you. I remember seeing a smoker's lung in a jar in the 1960's. It was black and rotten. It was terrifying.
The idea that nobody knew cigs were bad for you until the 1960's is completely false. It was common knowledge.
People in 2060 are going to look back to the 1990s and say "The idea that nobody knew climate change was bad", "Every climate scientist how look at the data could see how bad the warming would be"
There's a complex public discourse, where even relatively small numbers of bad actors can really fuck up the whole situation.
It was common knowledge. But then the constant bombardment with advertising showing the great social advantages of being a smoker. And so many people fell along the wayside, I just buried another one at the ripe old age of 59.
The peer pressure to smoke and drink was absolutely enormous and I really don't hold it against my classmates for folding. In that sense being in the 'out' group of the class made it easier to resist the pressure, though some of those kids would go completely overboard thinking that if only they out-drank and out-smoked the clique they'd be let in.
That's a great blog post. But per the article, this is a RICO suit. Maybe it's not a good one, I'm not qualified to judge. But that's the complaint. And this industry has been successfully sued (by the DoJ) under RICO in the past, so it's not without precedent.
> Let me answer that by telling you the elements of civil RICO — that is, the list of things a plaintiff would have to prove to win a RICO case.
> To win, a plaintiff would have to prove (1) conduct, (2) of an enterprise, (3) through a pattern, (4) of racketeering activity called "predicate acts," (5) causing injury to the plaintiff’s "business or property."
I think the fact that the tobacco industry has already been sued under this law makes it more likely that it also applies to this case
Every journalist and editor should read that and not even bother writing up civil RICO suits unless you can get an actual lawyer to tell you that particular one is different for some reason.
Godspeed. These companies have proven themselves morally reprehensible time and time again. I'd love to see serious criminal charges for the executives though.
Serious question: why just the executives? I know everybody needs a job to get by, but there’s an expression for getting by by getting kids hooked on harmful drugs: being a shitbum drug dealer. There should be some consequences when it comes to earning your living by damaging the health of children.
The thing that get's me about Juul is that it's basically a bunch of marketing money and visual design piled on a product that's strictly worse that the vaping options that came before it.
The biggest thing vs a regular mech mod is that it has single use proprietary cartridges that you have to throw out afterwards, vs spending less money on a bottle of vape juice that will last for way longer.
"a product that's strictly worse that the vaping options that came before it."
this is false. the Juul product is a 3rd iteration of a long line of vaping innovations. Juul was far ahead of their competitors when they launched: small, practical, easy to use, great nicotine hit. they're so far ahead that most of their competitors now use the Juul model of selling a compact vape along with pre-filled pods.
1. Targeting Kids. I don't see the targeting. Marketing a product as "cool"[1] is a valid tactic for the, say, 18–35 age demographic, too. Is there a way to market to 18-year-olds while actively dis-marketing to 17-year-olds? Serious question.
Anecdotally, the radio ads I hear for Juul are all testimonials from middle-aged smokers who switched. Which is not to say that they don't have other tactics, but this particular one can't be particularly attractive to teens.
2. Deceptive Marketing. Probably more legit, but not limited to tobacco. No marketing is going to tell you why not to use their product. Now, alcohol, nicotine, gambling, high fat/sugar foods, credit card debt, etc. should be held to a higher standard than, say, Forever 21.
[1] I.e., "social media posts glamorizing vaping", "flavors including mango, mint and creme brulee", "depicting the devices and those who use them as cool and sexy". Or from a sub-linked article, "mak[ing] it look cool and sleek".
"Juul hired social media influencers — people with large followings on Instagram — to promote its products. It created hashtags — #juul, #juulvapor, #switchtojuul, #vaporized — that the influencers blasted out to their followings, often featuring images of young people Juuling, or doing tricks or jokes with their device."
Impossible to design a campaign like this without understanding how many millions of teenagers follow Instagram influencers.
> Is there a way to market to 18-year-olds while actively dis-marketing to 17-year-olds?
If there is not, then don't market to 18 year olds. Very easy decision.
In the old good times British American Tobacco had a plan to start selling candies with nicotine so that they would get children hooked before they can smoke. They had to abandon the plan because sometimes children eat so much candy that they would get overdose and nicotine poisoning.
It's not by accident that Juul adopted similar marketing styles of big tobacco, the marketing and design of the products should speak for themselves [0]. WSJ also made a video exploring this business relationship a couple months back [1].
Juul ads and the old time cigarette ads from decades ago remind me of Coca Cola ads as well. These massive marketing budgets all take some ugly thing and make seem like you can't have fun or be cool without it.
I was wondering what took so long. I vaguely remember seeing the very first juul ad and I was under the impression that they might have been affiliated with snapchat (Same vibrant color scheme etc). After finding out that they were nicotine vapes, I was truly shocked that it was so blatantly targeted towards teenagers.
Australia has the right idea with cigarettes. They aren’t outlawed, but the packaging shows decayed lungs and the marketing is very regulated.
We shouldn’t outlaw vaping, but we do need to clamp down on targeting kids with their design and marketing. Maybe we should force all vape packages to include information on the harmful effects of nicotine.
We do the same thing in the UK, with explicit images of diseased lungs, eyes etc.
Taxes have also escalated year on year, so it now costs around £12.50 (~$15) for a pack of 20 cigarettes - I guess this has cut smoking rates more than the graphic imagery.
There is the packaging, but probably more important is increasing the tax (and therefore the price) over time. Demonstrable reductions in smokers every time the price goes up.
Is there some reason we shouldn't outlaw vaping? People who want to quit nicotine, or who consciously choose to become addicted to it, already have the gum and patches. And clearly vaping is creating a lot of new addicts.
At the very best, I think we should ban all advertising and paid marketing of addictive substances, and tax them heavily enough to provide free anti-addiction services to anybody who wants them. The whole theory of free markets, after all, is people making rational decisions, and the point of addictive products is to prevent them from doing so.
Not an American nor am I familiar with american laws. I'm curious to know whether tech companies that manipulate content to increase the time spent on an app/device can be scrutinised under the above act? Isn't spending hours and hours on an app/device basically an addiction?
Nicotine alternatives help people stop smoking, and Juul’s is the most innovative and compelling yet. Demonize them if you will but they have helped a lot of people’s health.
personally Juul is the only device that helped me quit smoking tobacco. i've tried other vapes and none compare to how easy it is to use a Juul, and how consistent their hits are. added bonus: i still get my nicotine, but without the rest of the cigarette chemicals (which btw, are radioactive: https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactivity-tobacco).
but this "Juul targeting children" thing is not new. i know they've been the focus of the US gov in the past, and they enacted some changes to their marketing (including removing some flavours and the like).
not sure what sparked this case thou, as in Europe (where i'm located) the whole tobacco industry is tightly regulated. but we can still get our nicotine without the government banning it (see San Francisco), although at a much lower strength (1.8 vs 5.0 in the states). this lower strength also helped.
so I hope due to this case Juul removes all this marketing BS and simply focus on their initial primary goal: making people drop tobacco and cigarettes.
If you haven't seen it, The Insider (1999) is well worth watching. It's based on a true story about a whistleblower in the tobacco industry. In the film the CEO knows nicotine is addictive and perjures himself.
I was recently on a tobacco case jury. I mentioned it to my Mom. The tobacco companies came to her high school in the 1950s and handed out free packs of cigarettes, 3 in each pack.
A complication to the whole story about the risks of vaping is that nicotine alone doesn't appear to be particularly addictive. The evidence suggests that it's specifically the combination of MAOI and nicotine found in tobacco that's actually so addictive:
I vaped a lot, lost my vape and didn't buy a new one. The period afterwards, with no vape/nicotine, was completely unproblematic, I had no issues quitting at all.
[+] [-] WheelsAtLarge|6 years ago|reply
They have some brilliant marketing people working for them.
[+] [-] i_feel_great|6 years ago|reply
These people are not brilliant. They are utterly deceitful. To go along with this shit in this day and age is utterly contemptible. Imagine all the people and the planning and the brainstorming to come up with such a trick - how can any of them not feel really really bad and storm out of the room?
Oh yeah, profit.
[+] [-] cowsandmilk|6 years ago|reply
actually, many times you can prove these things. produce the contract showing that juul paid for one ad to run after the other and they are really screwed. Or prosecutors who have a spine could easily just record the number of instances of the ads running together vs. separately and use that as evidence they are not intended to be separate ads. (It might even be possible to subpoena radio stations for their records that would show this).
Generally, judges don't take kindly to the type of "brilliance" that would be going into court and claiming "But they are two separate ads, so we weren't being misleading" if Juul indeed arranged for them to run one after the other.
[+] [-] jacquesm|6 years ago|reply
FWIW I hate people like that. If that's the best you can do with your creativity then you're no better than a scientist that works on chemical weapons.
[+] [-] madez|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roberto|6 years ago|reply
Those don't need to be promoted, usually.
[+] [-] Simon_says|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ta346636346|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterBright|6 years ago|reply
The first thing every doctor would advise sick patients to do was quit smoking.
Every doctor who autopsied a dead smoker could see how bad smoking was for you. I remember seeing a smoker's lung in a jar in the 1960's. It was black and rotten. It was terrifying.
The idea that nobody knew cigs were bad for you until the 1960's is completely false. It was common knowledge.
[+] [-] cbsmith|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Traster|6 years ago|reply
There's a complex public discourse, where even relatively small numbers of bad actors can really fuck up the whole situation.
[+] [-] jacquesm|6 years ago|reply
The peer pressure to smoke and drink was absolutely enormous and I really don't hold it against my classmates for folding. In that sense being in the 'out' group of the class made it easier to resist the pressure, though some of those kids would go completely overboard thinking that if only they out-drank and out-smoked the clique they'd be let in.
[+] [-] neuronic|6 years ago|reply
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/27476...
[+] [-] Pinckney|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajross|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raverbashing|6 years ago|reply
> To win, a plaintiff would have to prove (1) conduct, (2) of an enterprise, (3) through a pattern, (4) of racketeering activity called "predicate acts," (5) causing injury to the plaintiff’s "business or property."
I think the fact that the tobacco industry has already been sued under this law makes it more likely that it also applies to this case
[+] [-] bane|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xxpor|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rolltiide|6 years ago|reply
I would even through in the subsequent PR for free
[+] [-] liability|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Pinckney|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bongobongo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HNcantBtrustd|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] p1necone|6 years ago|reply
The biggest thing vs a regular mech mod is that it has single use proprietary cartridges that you have to throw out afterwards, vs spending less money on a bottle of vape juice that will last for way longer.
[+] [-] kmlx|6 years ago|reply
this is false. the Juul product is a 3rd iteration of a long line of vaping innovations. Juul was far ahead of their competitors when they launched: small, practical, easy to use, great nicotine hit. they're so far ahead that most of their competitors now use the Juul model of selling a compact vape along with pre-filled pods.
[+] [-] basseq|6 years ago|reply
1. Targeting Kids. I don't see the targeting. Marketing a product as "cool"[1] is a valid tactic for the, say, 18–35 age demographic, too. Is there a way to market to 18-year-olds while actively dis-marketing to 17-year-olds? Serious question.
Anecdotally, the radio ads I hear for Juul are all testimonials from middle-aged smokers who switched. Which is not to say that they don't have other tactics, but this particular one can't be particularly attractive to teens.
2. Deceptive Marketing. Probably more legit, but not limited to tobacco. No marketing is going to tell you why not to use their product. Now, alcohol, nicotine, gambling, high fat/sugar foods, credit card debt, etc. should be held to a higher standard than, say, Forever 21.
[1] I.e., "social media posts glamorizing vaping", "flavors including mango, mint and creme brulee", "depicting the devices and those who use them as cool and sexy". Or from a sub-linked article, "mak[ing] it look cool and sleek".
[+] [-] apexalpha|6 years ago|reply
Also, the fact that you hear the ads on the radio makes teens not the target demographic. But here is a more in depth article: https://www.vox.com/2019/1/25/18194953/vape-juul-e-cigarette...
[+] [-] burkaman|6 years ago|reply
https://www.vox.com/2019/1/25/18194953/vape-juul-e-cigarette...
http://tobacco.stanford.edu/tobacco_main/publications/JUUL_M...
"Juul hired social media influencers — people with large followings on Instagram — to promote its products. It created hashtags — #juul, #juulvapor, #switchtojuul, #vaporized — that the influencers blasted out to their followings, often featuring images of young people Juuling, or doing tricks or jokes with their device."
Impossible to design a campaign like this without understanding how many millions of teenagers follow Instagram influencers.
> Is there a way to market to 18-year-olds while actively dis-marketing to 17-year-olds?
If there is not, then don't market to 18 year olds. Very easy decision.
[+] [-] nabla9|6 years ago|reply
In the old good times British American Tobacco had a plan to start selling candies with nicotine so that they would get children hooked before they can smoke. They had to abandon the plan because sometimes children eat so much candy that they would get overdose and nicotine poisoning.
[+] [-] kregasaurusrex|6 years ago|reply
[0] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D3u7m6nXoAA628x?format=jpg&name=...
[1] https://www.wsj.com/video/how-juul-took-a-page-from-big-toba...
[+] [-] rosybox|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cmauniada|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] parsimo2010|6 years ago|reply
We shouldn’t outlaw vaping, but we do need to clamp down on targeting kids with their design and marketing. Maybe we should force all vape packages to include information on the harmful effects of nicotine.
[+] [-] GordonS|6 years ago|reply
Taxes have also escalated year on year, so it now costs around £12.50 (~$15) for a pack of 20 cigarettes - I guess this has cut smoking rates more than the graphic imagery.
[+] [-] Gatsky|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wpietri|6 years ago|reply
At the very best, I think we should ban all advertising and paid marketing of addictive substances, and tax them heavily enough to provide free anti-addiction services to anybody who wants them. The whole theory of free markets, after all, is people making rational decisions, and the point of addictive products is to prevent them from doing so.
[+] [-] not_ai_yes_pr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JamesCoyne|6 years ago|reply
Count one is civil RICO. Make of that what you will.
Edit: Very similar to this: https://www.classaction.org/media/nessmith-v-juul-labs-et-al...
[+] [-] magoon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ausbah|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kmlx|6 years ago|reply
but this "Juul targeting children" thing is not new. i know they've been the focus of the US gov in the past, and they enacted some changes to their marketing (including removing some flavours and the like).
not sure what sparked this case thou, as in Europe (where i'm located) the whole tobacco industry is tightly regulated. but we can still get our nicotine without the government banning it (see San Francisco), although at a much lower strength (1.8 vs 5.0 in the states). this lower strength also helped.
so I hope due to this case Juul removes all this marketing BS and simply focus on their initial primary goal: making people drop tobacco and cigarettes.
[+] [-] vixen99|6 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Insider_(film)
[+] [-] VxfnhTAJ|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onlyrealcuzzo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ahupp|6 years ago|reply
https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine#addictiveness
[+] [-] kristofferR|6 years ago|reply
I vaped a lot, lost my vape and didn't buy a new one. The period afterwards, with no vape/nicotine, was completely unproblematic, I had no issues quitting at all.
[+] [-] 9nGQluzmnq3M|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quickthrower2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 3xblah|6 years ago|reply