Smoke and mirrors on issue funding won’t deter critics
When it comes to communicating your sources of funding, the issue isn't just how things are, but how things appear, writes crisis comms expert Tony Jaques.
Transparency should be the basis for effective issue management, especially when it comes to who’s paying the bills. How a campaign is funded not only needs to be appropriate, but must also be seen to be appropriate.
This was the lesson for a group of doctors lobbying for nicotine e-cigarettes as a way to help people quit smoking when a news report revealed their set-up funding came from an e-liquid supplier and an e-cigarette company. 
The Australian Tobacco Harm Reduction Association (ATHRA), which wants to overturn the ban on vaping nicotine without a doctor’s prescription, said it would “get funding from the vendors and whoever else – not tobacco companies obviously – but it will be at arm’s length, with a view to having a detailed website on the safety of e-cigarettes, where to buy them, how to use them.”
Asked why they had removed the founding sponsors’ logos from their website, ATHRA Chair Colin Mendelsohn reportedly said it had been done on legal advice and not to “reduce transparency.” However the website of the e-cigarette maker, which offers an online medical prescription service, still says “Nicovape is proudly a sponsor of the Australian Tobacco Harm Reduction Association,” alongside the association’s logo.
While Mendelsohn told Fairfax the vaping industry is “quite separate from the tobacco industry”, the perception is very different. Although the Association’s two Australian sponsors are small local companies, the vaping industry worldwide is in fact well and truly dominated by Big Tobacco.
Recent analysis reported the vaping industry is today worth about $10 billion globally and is expected to reach $34 billion by 2021. And whereas it was once the province of small businesses, the vaping industry is increasingly the domain by the major tobacco companies, which own some of the world’s biggest e-cigarette brands.
Moreover the National Health and Medical Research Council says there is insufficient evidence to conclude whether e-cigarettes can help smokers quit. The Council also says the widely used claim that e-cigarettes are 95% less harmful than tobacco cigarettes comes from a study based on opinion rather than empirical evidence, with concerns raised about potential conflicts of interest.
Big Tobacco has a long history of using front organisations to fight restrictive regulations. Think no further than the Alliance of Australian Retailers which was established to oppose plain packaging of cigarettes and claimed to represent owners of corner stores, milk bars, news agents and service stations. It was soon revealed that their TV advertising was almost entirely funded by three of the world’s largest tobacco companies, and plain packaging became the law.
However the cigarette industry is by no means alone in the creation of fake community groups. For example, some years ago the makers of cardboard milk cartons set up “Mothers Opposed to Pollution” as a supposed environmental activist group to campaign against plastic milk containers in Australia and New Zealand. Then there was shopping mall giant Westfield which once admitted in court that it had used apparently independent local resident groups to resist rival retail developments.
The purpose in the present case is not to suggest that ATHRA is a front organisation, or to cast doubt on the sincerity of well-intentioned doctors who want to change the law.
But in terms of issue management, it raises the question whether the association has seemingly allowed itself to be compromised by commercial interests. The issue here is not just how things are, but how things appear, and whether trusted medical practitioners should be seen to be lobbying on behalf of the makers of nicotine-based e-cigarettes.
Tony Jaques is the managing director of Issue Outcomes P/L.
“the vaping industry is increasingly the domain by the major tobacco companies”.
How’s that, Tony? Reckon ‘big tobacco’ are very very subtly financing the advancement of a new industry that stands to erode (if not seriously traduce) their core business? Care to shed light on the why and the how of this unlikely initiative?
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It seems counterintuitive, but it is true that Big Tobacco is taking a major market share of the e-cigarette industry.
Although this was not my main point, the reasons are spelled out in the long piece from The Verge linked in my story.
With regard to ownership, Huffington Post, for example, reported last year that the popular brand VUSE, is owned by R.J. Reynolds Vapor Company, a subsidiary of the tobacco giant Reynolds America.
British American Tobacco (BAT), the largest tobacco company in the Europe, launched Vype around four years ago and Altria (formerly Phillip Morris) owns MarkTen.
Lorillard paid $135 million for Blu, but when R.J. Reynolds bought that tobacco company in 2015, its e-cigarette brand was sold to Imperial Tobacco, a company in the United Kingdom.
This trend is not new and a very detailed report in 2017 discussed how big tobacco companies have come to dominate the e-cigarette market through a series of mergers and acquisitions.
Feel free to contact me directly (Tjaques@issueoutcomes.com.au) and I am happy to send the links to anyone who wants more information on this
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Cheers Tony, will be in touch.
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Those e-cigs pictured don’t reflect the products being sold by big tobacco. Big tobacco is lobbying the FDA to have them (the one pictured) banned:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ecigarettes-regulations-specialreport-idUSKBN0MJ0GN20150323
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All major tobacco companies have major interests in ecigs and related products. They are so big that they can pick and choose the time that they will take over the relative minnows in the ersatz vaping industry. This is exactly the history of what happened with the transnationals who began acquiring national tobacco companies, including former state monopolies, from the 1970s onward. There are very few left now. As you suggest, ATHRA’s claim that it was legally concerned about acknowledging its grants from the local ecig interests on its website contrast with the in-your-face willingness of those interests to publicise themselves.
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This and other articles are just used to demonise tobacco harm reduction via a smear campaign. Its tiring politics that in the end harms smokers and their families by giving them less options to move away from tobacco. Unfortunately the public health/quit service/health charity industries are fully behind and actively lobbying against more options for smokers.Public health heroes furiously and almost daily tweeting anti-harm reduction messages is a really sad situation.
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It shouldn’t matter who is investing in new harm-reduced nicotine products. What should matter is thorough independent peer-reviewed research on whether they are safer. On that count the evidence is overwhelming. Public Health England and the NHS in the UK are encouraging smokers to switch and have said they are 95% less risky than cigarettes. Canada and NZ are regulating and doing the same. Why isn’t Australia. Hopeless!
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Tobacco companies now own many big e cigarette brands. Its hard to believe that governments are so much influenced by groups who have vested interest in causing harm to public. Government should make their independent decisions and not look for cash. Public health is much more important than anything else. Whether to allow nicotine or not should be based on facts, its good or bad effect and not on pressure from some group. Hope this pull and push about e cigarette ends soon and there is uniform regulation around Australia and also the world.
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