 As most of you know, this lecture was added a little bit later to our whole series because we know we have so many students who are interested in business and economics and what's going on in the Polymerge school. And on our original list, we've been unable to get a professor from the School of Business to speak with us. So, we're trying to have as broad a range as possible in this series so you get an idea of what's going on all over the university. And I feel really fortunate that we were able to have Professor Ketchman come and speak to us. So, I'm going to read you a little bit from her brief bio. And as I've said before, you know, when I go on our faculty profile system and I see brief bio and then the thing is two pages long, it's, I just, I get more and more impressed. And Connie has received nearly $1.5 million in grants to study anti-smoking advertising and adolescence. She assists the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy in overseeing a federally funded multi-year, billion dollar anti-drug advertising campaign. So, I don't know, how many of you have ever seen anti-smoking advertisements? There you go. They're a target. There's a connection here. She conducts controlled experiments to study the effects of advertising on consumers, focusing on if and how the federal government should regulate controversial advertising forms. Currently, she's studying the effectiveness of various anti-smoking and anti-drug advertising tactics. So, I'm not sure what she's going to tell us today, but I'm looking forward to hearing it and be very careful here. You've never talked in this room. This is quite impressive. Thank you so much for coming. You're welcome. Thank you. Connie Pechman. I'm from the Palmarage School. And I'm going to be talking about four different research projects that I've done to just give you an overview of what I've done for like the last 15 years of my life with that $1.5 million that I got from the state to study this. If you want, if you're really interested and you want to hear more about my work, I have a website, www.anti-smokingads.org, and I have all my papers posted there. Or you can email. So, in the business school, most of the professors do research to help companies make better management decisions. But there are some of us who work to help the government make better policies. So, my whole goal is to help the government who may not be experts at all in marketing to understand marketing so that they can better regulate marketing. So, I work with the FDA, I work with the FTC, and those kinds of groups to make sure that the marketing that you see is fair and it's not deceptive. And in this particular case, I'm dealing with making sure that young kids don't see a lot of cigarette marketing that persuades them underage to smoke because you're not even legally able to smoke when you're an adolescent, right? Do you know what age you're allowed to smoke? 18. 18, right. So, is it legal to market to people under 18 with cigarettes? No. Does it happen? Yes. Okay. So, that's what we're talking about. So, the research questions I asked are pretty basic like why do you smoke? What is the role of tobacco marketing? And how can governments deter youth from smoking? And I'm actually one of the first people to ask these questions because it turns out that most of the prominent marketing professors were actually paid off by tobacco companies not to do this research. They hired them as consultants and they said, you know, we're going to have you on a payroll in case we ever need you. And so, therefore, these people, my colleagues older people older than me, never did this research because they basically were paid off. So, I got money from the state to start doing these things. And smoking is a huge issue, huge problem health-wise. You probably know, but I think you see much less of it in California. So, how many people do you think smoked? What's the percentage of adults that smoke in California? Yeah, 15, 16 percent. What about in the U.S.? How much? Yeah, 20, low 20s, okay? So, what about a group of people that have a graduate degree? What do you think their smoking rate is? It's like 7 percent. So, depending on where you are, you're going to see very different smoking rates in it. You see here, we see very little smoking because we're among people who have degrees and they're the least likely to smoke because the best predictor smoking is socioeconomic status, as it turns out. And country. If you look at the rest of the world, though, it's an enormous problem. Globally, 47 percent of men still smoke. Can you believe that? Half of men smoke. 12 percent of women, because in most of the rest of the world it's not considered appropriate for women to smoke. And 30 percent of youth. And in China, where I just spoke, it's Shanghai, 67 percent of men smoke. I mean, you can't be anywhere without seeing most people around you smoking. It causes, smoking causes 5.4 million deaths a year. Okay? So, that's so big, it's hard to imagine. I mean, can you take another catastrophe that caused that many deaths? And it's projected to cause 9 million deaths by 2027 million in developing. So that means that developed countries are doing a really good job of reducing the smoking, but the smokers are increasing in the developing countries. And so that's a problem. So, basically people around the world look at researchers here in the United States for help, because we're at the cutting edge, we're actually getting smoking to go down. They're in the opposite situation, we're smoking is going up. And especially among women, because they want to be independent. And just like in the United States, men used to smoke and women didn't. And then women caught up with men, that's happening worldwide. By the way, if you guys have any questions, you don't understand something, you want to just talk, raise your hand, okay? I'm not used to this big. Okay, so I'm going to talk about these four projects. All my projects were funded by the California Tobacco Related Disease Research Program. This is the biggest tobacco research program in the world. And it's funded because California is a very big economy with lots of people. And a lot of smokers. And so, and taxpayers put a tax on, a surtax on cigarettes. You know how much it is, a surtax? 25 cents, of which like half of one cent goes to research, but it ends up generating millions of dollars a year. Tens of millions of dollars a year. And so each time I get a project, it's like 200, you know, it's a couple hundred thousand dollars. You know what I'm saying? But over time, I've gotten a 1.5 million of this money. To study these kinds of issues about marketing. So, basically smokers are funding my research and I really appreciate that. So I'm going to talk about four projects. One is effects of cigarette ads, then anti-smoking ads, then smoking scenes and movies, and then anti-smoking TV shows. So you see that it kind of has a theme. I kind of tackle one problem at a time. Okay, I'm going to talk about how my research was actually used by policymakers. And how I do my research is I go into middle schools, usually, because guess when kids start smoking? Actually, like middle school, most of them. And then they really smoke in high school, but they're already experimenting. I know I started in eighth grade, but I don't smoke now. How many people smoke here? You can admit it. No one? Okay, a few. Okay, so. Alright, so I go into these middle schools where they let me ask kids and their parents for permission to participate in the studies. I get them out of their classroom. I set up, like, little theaters. And I show them TV shows or movies or whatever in these little theaters. I, you know, rent equipment, big screens, speakers. And I randomly assign them to either see the smoking-related stuff or the same, say, for example, if I'm studying anti-smoking ads, I'll show them a sitcom and some people will see the anti-smoking ads in the sitcom and other people will just see other ads, the real ads that were really in the sitcom. And then I compare the two groups. And because I'm randomly assigning them, they should be even, equal. And so if there's a difference between the groups, I can attribute that to exposure to the anti-smoking shows. And this is called a randomized control trial. And it's considered a gold standard for doing research. It's how, like, all drugs are tested. You randomly assign people to get the placebo or to get the regular drug. And so that's what I'm doing, okay? And so they basically have about 90% participation rate. I have about 500 students in each study. And I use real TV shows, real ads, real movies. So when I studied a movie, it was an hour and a half long. They got to get out of class an hour and a half to do my studies, okay? But schools are wonderful at cooperating because they know this is important. And so this is my first paper. It's about the effect of cigarette ads on kids. And it was award-winning. It was published in 2002. It got the best paper of the year. So the real question here was, do cigarette ads affect primary demand? So the question is, do kids who say they aren't going to smoke, never smoke, never will smoke? They are not interested at all in smoking. Do cigarette ads affect them? Because if they do, that's really bad, right? It's the ad itself that's causing the interest. They have no prior interest. So you can pretty much blame the marketers, right? And this has been how influential are ads versus peers who smoke. And this was incredibly controversial with no data. Because as I said, all these guys were paid off not to do this research. And so this might be a typical cigarette ad. And it's a little dark, but here's just a screenshot of some kid smoking, right? And what the prevailing belief was is that ads cannot affect you if you have no interest in the product. And that's been shown that if you have no interest at all in a product, do you pay attention to the ad for it? Are you influenced by the ad? Almost never. And young people say they're influenced by peers. They never say they're influenced by ads. They say, my friend smoke. Everyone smoke. It's cool to do. I want to do it. In tobacco companies, of course, say it's not us. Kids already are interested in smoking. We just advertise once they're interested and then they choose our brand or a different brand. But we don't affect what's called primary demand in economics. So I did some studies in which I basically created video tapes, like kind of reality video tapes, in which kids were filming their environment. And it was a big deal to get permission from the cities to tape these things. And we basically taped, you know, videotaped ads and videotaped kids smoking and created different versions of this videotape. So some kids saw the ads. Some kids saw the kids smoking. Some kids saw both. Some kids saw neither. And we could look at the causal effects of this type of exposure. So all told, they were seeing, like, a half an hour worth of a videotape and maybe, like, five minutes of smoking material. Because they don't know that I'm doing a smoking study. They just think I'm doing a marketing study. And I asked them a bunch of questions about other stuff, so they don't know. Okay. So what I found was that, or the research that I used, the theory, all of our research is based on theory. So the theory that I used for this was that ads can affect how you see people. So there have been a whole lot of research to show that ads, for example, if you see an ad for candy, and it says the candy's really sweet, when you taste the candy, it actually tastes sweet, er, than if you hadn't seen the ad. So ads affect the way you perceive the world. So I said, huh, that would explain why kids think friends are influencing them to smoke, because that's a direct effect, but the ads are affecting the way they see their friends. And making their friends who smoke look really cool. So they're saying, oh, I smoke because it's cool, my friends all smoke. But the reason smoking looks cool to them is because of the ads. That was a theory. And I think you guys know about priming, because, for example, Toyota cars. People would step on the accelerator instead of the brake, and they'd have uncontrollable acceleration, and they'd blame like themselves. Then all of a sudden you hear Toyota screwed up and made these cars that accelerate. And all of a sudden everyone started blaming Toyota. So it's just a matter of what you have in your head, you know, you're not sure, right? So once everyone thought it was Toyota, then everyone blamed Toyota, and most people were wrong, it really wasn't Toyota as it turns out. So that's a prime. If you plant something in people's head in it, it's going to be the world. And it's a very strong effect, this priming stuff. So basically I found that that's what was happening. So through my research I found that cigarette ads make the show models who look cool. And so then you get the kind of, in the back of your mind, you think, oh, smokers are cool. And then when you see people who smoke, they really look cool. I remember all my friends look cool You know what I'm saying? My friends who smoke, I don't think they were objectively cool, but because they smoke they look cool to me, and they look cool because the ads may not look cool, in part. So then of course you smoke because you want to look cool. You know what I'm saying? So basically the thing is kids do not realize that their perceptions are distorted by ads. Just like that Toyota people had no idea, did I step on, I don't know what caused the acceleration. I used to think it was me, but now I think it's Toyota. We don't know, you know? So basically what this research showed is that there was this kind of effect. And so there was a huge increase in interest in smoking among these kids who had never smoked and said they had no interest in smoking so they would never smoke. But if they saw a bunch of really cool cigarette ads and then they saw people smoking, the combination of the two, so it was a two-step process. The ads and the peers together, not neither one alone, but the two together caused this effect. So this was the first study, just remember, won an award because it was the first study that actually showed a causal effect of cigarette ads on these really young kids who were non-smokers. And then it became a crime of evidence for the government because I don't know if you know, but the U.S. government had a huge case for tobacco companies for deceptive advertising and who won the case? The government, right. The government won the case. And so they had to pay a lot of money and who knows, actually the government didn't win many penalties, but basically got to say tobacco companies are bad, we got to stop doing this, although they didn't get much in the way of penalties from their companies. And my research was one of the main pieces of research they used to say these ads are affecting little kids who otherwise would not smoke. And this is how it's working and here's the evidence for it. Okay, so that's the first study and then I said, hi, I really want to study some other things beyond this. So I decided to study anti-smoking ads and see what we could do to prevent this effect. And now anti-smoking ads, you said you all saw them, correct? You've seen a lot of anti-smoking ads? There's a whole variety of anti-smoking ads. So you can talk about death and disfigurement. You've seen those kinds of ads, right? People in graves and deathbeds and stuff like that. Or you can suggest that big tobacco, the truth ads, big tobacco is a new evil empire that these guys are manipulating you and you got to watch out for them. They're evil people, evil executives. You've seen those ads, right? Or smoking, not smoking is cooler than smoking. It's kind of a social message. And this is from the Washington Post. If you think the answer is obvious, you haven't seen the distinctly different approaches taken up by anti-smoking ad campaigns. So you probably know the attorneys general negotiated a settlement on their own with tobacco companies. Got a huge amount of money from them. Do you know this about 10 years ago? Well before the federal government's case. And so everyone got this money and they were all supposed to spend it on anti-smoking ads. So all the different states, I would say about 50% didn't do anything. But about 50% of the states tried to run anti-smoking ads and each state came up with their own approach. So what did I do? I got examples of all their ads. The different states. I went to Arizona and California and Massachusetts and Wisconsin and collected, called all the departments of health, got all their ads and then tested each type. Because everyone wanted to know, did these all work? Do some of these work? Do some work better than others? No one had done any research on it. Do you have any idea what would work? So no one had done any research on kids. So they weren't sure. So, okay, so this is one of these two, she's not coming out so great, but this is the guy that's lying with a tube through his mouth in a hospital bed. So that's a death one. This one is about tobacco companies. This is women are making the rush to rich flavor and then really they're trying to say women are making us rich. And it adds about smoking being uncool. And then adds, these are the main categories. And it adds about smoking hurting other people. And the main thing is showing parents hurting their children. So you've seen where the parents are smoking and then the smoke comes out of the kids mouth, their coughing and that kind of stuff. Have you seen those? So these were the main types of ads. I collected all these, stuck them in television shows, went into school to randomly assign people to see different ad types to see what worked. And lo and behold some worked better than others. And some were no better than not seeing anything. So in other words, some were so bad that they were exactly the same as a group who saw no ads. Do you guys have any questions or comments? Do you want to guess which approach worked the best and why? Who's talking? Raise your hand. This one, hurting others? Anyone else? Why do you think the hurting other was one would work? Yeah. You know what, you're exactly right. Maybe I described it in such a way that I'm leaning towards that answer. Yes, this did work by far the best. Is this the only type of ad you see these days? No, because people, I found this to be a very personal topic. And when you told the state that they were using an approach that wasn't so good, they said, who are you to tell me? Who are you, Dr. Pechman? We think our ads are good. Get away. So they didn't listen actually, except the state of California tried to listen and ran a whole bunch more of these ads once they saw the research, because they actually funded the research and I'm from California. But I didn't have a lot of input in other states because they already had a preference for a type of ad. What about the tobacco that was about attacking the tobacco industry? Would you think those would work? Yeah, why do you think they would work? You with the pen? Yeah. I'm listening, yeah. I'm just trying to go to that one. So you think that one might work? How about someone who said they disagreed? Does anyone think that these might not work? Yeah? Oh, yeah. And yeah, anything else? I think people who are already smoking really don't care, and we think they're part of the divine solar. It's hard to identify with these executives. Yeah. You know, I got the impression talking to kids that they think all marketers are a little sleazy. To tell you the truth. I'm in marketing, so. But they kind of know of McDonald's, tries to get little kids to eat their food and then so they'll eat McDonald's their whole life. You know, they kind of get that, right? And so they think kind of all marketing is pretty bad. So tobacco marketing is sort of like, why should I not buy all, then it wouldn't buy anything. I'd have to make all my own food and clothes. And they kind of like marketers, you know, like a lot of marketers like Apple and stuff, they like them. So it turns out I didn't find this to work very well. But again, the truth campaign, they just were very unhappy with my research, so they keep doing the truth ads. But at least, you know, I have to say this, in this study, I didn't have as much impact on policy as some of the other studies, but you can't always have people, you know, if your results conform to what they want, then they're like, okay, I'm gonna do it, Dr. Peshman, you're brilliant. And if the results don't conform to what they want, I learn they go, Dr. Peshman, we think you're wrong on that one. So you can only publish your results and then people end up deciding based on the accumulation of evidence. And they weren't gonna change their mind based on one study. So that's fine. Okay, so basically, why do the smoking disease and death ones not work? Because youth feel invulnerable. I remember when I smoked at, say, 20 seconds off my life for every pop. Ha, ha, ha. Like, who cares? I mean, I joked about it, you know? So if you make it scary, it actually makes it more attractive, you know? Because people think they're gonna quit. Look at scary amusement rides. Who rides those? Adolescents, the same ones who smoke. So that doesn't work very well at all. And in general, people don't care what companies do. So that didn't work so well. The uncooled because of bad breath, that didn't work either because people said, I can use mouthwash. What's wrong with that? I don't care about bad breath. You know what I'm saying? I can use perfume. Anything cosmetic, I can deal with. But this hurting others, that really hurt people because you were like, that was sort of an ethical thing? Like, really? And these were, again, all this... I study adolescents who are prone not to smoke. So I'm just trying to get them not to smoke. All of these campaigns were targeted at young people who were not smoking. And so that just made them think, huh, do I really want to do that? And then when I'm an adult, I hurt my kid. Do I really want my brother or sister to be exposed to that? You know, that really... hit them in the heart. And so that worked really well. So I think this slide is just going to tell you what I just said, that the one that did work with smoking hurt, which someone in the audience already figured out. So very good. So as I said, California increased the use of these ads of smoking hurting others. But many groups use the evil tobacco company ads. And these actually worked a little bit, but they weren't nearly as good. You know what I'm saying? As the ones that were about hurting other people. So the tobacco ones work, but you have to do it a lot more to get the same bang for your buck. They're not as efficient. Okay. So then my next study was about smoking in movies. Is there a lot of smoking in movies? Not as much anymore because there was a recent press release saying that smoking's gone down. Right? But that's because of all the pressure that's been put on these companies because there's an enormous group out there trying to get smoking on movies. Because I can't tell you how many kids smoke because they see it in the movies. And I know myself, for example, I remember vividly seeing movies and then changing my behavior based on that movie. It's much, I mean, a movie's an hour and a half, an ad is 30 seconds. So what's going to affect you more, right? So, you know, there are numerous examples of my own life of how I should have been, but I was influenced by movies. So the issue here was, I was pretty certain that smoking in movies would encourage kids to smoke because I had originally done the other study about cigarette ads, but I needed to approve because you cannot go to any court without and just say, well, it's obvious. You know what I'm saying? You have to have this randomized control trial. You have to have 500 kids. You have to have statistical evidence. You have to show power analysis. These are scientists. Even the government, they need the science. So even if you think it's obvious, you still have to approve it to have an effect. So I was the first one who did this study and approved it. I mean, this got, like, I was on TV. It was scary. I was on, you know, like the morning show and the evening show and when this came out because this was the very first study on smoking in movies. And the real thing I was trying to look at was can the anti-smoking ad inoculate kids? So if you show a 30-second ad before a movie, can that offset the effect of the whole movie? And I wasn't sure. That, I really had no idea. 30 seconds versus an hour and a half. So the movie I actually used, because this was a while back when I did the study, was reality bites with Winona Ryder and Ethan Hawken. It was before Winona Ryder went off the deep end and, you know, stole clothes and, you know, so basically it was her first bad girl role when she smoked with Ethan Hawken and she chose Ethan Hawken over some Ben Stiller who wasn't a smoker. And it was a PG... I think it was a PG-13 movie. So it was definitely a teen movie. So basically they were like in high school or maybe just starting college. And so I used that movie. And like I said, kids who participated got to go out of class and see Winona Ryder and reality bites. And so they either saw it in original form or they saw it with an anti-smoking ad before it. Or they saw a version of the movie with no smoking because it turns out that you can get an editor to edit out the smoking and just fill in other material. And they do that all the time if you see movies in like airlines. It'll say it's been edited for its content and they might take out like pot use or whatever is offensive. So when I said to someone, can you edit out smoking for me? She said, yeah, in five minutes. You know what I'm saying? They do it all the time. As they pointed out, every movie is edited. Every movie is edited. Editing is no big deal for us. So I made a version of the movie look perfect except they had no smoking and no one knew any differently. So it was perfect. I got to see what was the effect of the movie and then what was the effect of putting the anti-smoking ad. And my idea of putting the anti-smoking ad before... So here was Ethan Hawke and Winona. And this was the anti-smoking ad which showed it was really funny and it was like a social comment. So basically, this was a guy in a gas mask in a bathroom where people were smoking and he was saying how disgusting it was and how his girlfriend started to smoke and this is what she looks like now. So it was kind of like a really funny but very much a social ad about how inappropriate it is to smoke and how uncool it is. So anyway, at the time there were no hurt people ads so I had to use this one because I did this actually before there were a lot of those hurt people ads that I know are even better than me. Okay, so did it work? Did the anti-smoking ad work? Remember this story I said about Toyota that everyone thought, you know, initially when people were having problems with acceleration in a Toyota they probably blamed it on themselves that they were hitting the accelerator instead of the brake. Then all of a sudden you heard Toyota was screwed, did something wrong and then all of a sudden you blamed every single incident on Toyota. So basically it just depends on your initial perception. So I said to myself, huh, these are all kids who don't smoke and say they don't smoke so if I could just remind them at the beginning of the movie that smoking is not a good thing and really create a negative impression a really solid negative impression it could protect them like an inoculation from flu. So that was my theory and it turned out it worked. I couldn't believe it. When you watch kids and they saw the movie with smoking they were like laughing and joking and saying, wow, when Minona right it was smoking but when I showed them the anti-smoking ad before their whole reaction to the movie changed. They went, ew! Like you know what I'm saying? They go, oh what's she doing that for? 30 seconds of that initial image could change their mindset. You know, it's called priming. It's so powerful that as soon as the smoking started they just reacted negatively. So it worked. So anyway, smoking is still in tons of movies. So even though it's declined smoking is still, it used to be in like half of all movies and now it's still in like 40% of all movies. It's in a lot of PG movies, PG-13 movies. There's a ton of smoking in a lot of young people see movies. So it's a big problem. They're having no studies. Oh, and the reason it's important to study anti-smoking ads is can you ban smoking in movies? Is that legal? No. Because the First Amendment rights and even India, which has different laws than us, tried to ban smoking in movies saying you cannot have a movie with smoking and it was overturned. So you can't stop smoking in movies but if you can put like a little message before the movie that changes people's mindset that's even better really because it lets people make up their own mind, right? You kind of give them both sides of the picture and you let them decide what they want. So this is why I thought an anti-smoking ad approach might work. Although would you like to see an anti-smoking ad in a movie theater before a movie with smoking or would you get mad? You wouldn't mind? Good. Would anyone else mind? Would you tell me, would you get really mad if you saw an anti-smoking ad in a movie theater? No. No, good. Because I remember being on a radio show talking about the study and a whole bunch of people called in this was an LA somewhere saying what is wrong with you Dr. Peshman? There's too many ads in movie theaters already that's a stupid idea. And I said well what is your solution then? Just let all these kids die? You know what I'm saying? I mean you can't ban smoking in movies so what can you do? So anyway I personally think it was a very onerous recommendation. Has anything happened with this? Do you ever see an anti-smoking ad in a movie theater? Do you ever see an anti-smoking ad on a DVD of a movie? I'm going to tell you something. Have you seen an anti-DVD movie? No. No? You have? Yeah. Okay. So I'm going to tell you what happened with this research in a minute. Okay, by the way why is there so much smoking in movies? I talked to writers. They said they want to elicit arousal or excitement in movies. So in adult movies you show naked people. You show people killing each other. You show you know heroin injections. All that gets a rise out of people. There's a bunch of really bad behavior in movies that you would never engage in, right? There's criminals, people jumping off roofs. Nothing like that occurs in real life, right? It's very extreme. Why do they do that? Because they want to arouse you. We like that. With PG movies they can't show that. They can't show violence. They can't show nudity. They can't show drug use. They can show smoking. They're doing it on purpose to get kids aroused. But what it also does is it desensitizes kids. It makes them think smoking is acceptable. And so if you see like, so basically it happens with everything. The first time you show a violent movie in a series you might have 150 people die. The second time you have to have 100 people die. The third time you have to have 150 people die because people are desensitized. They think, ah, that's okay. There's nothing edgy about that. You know, I've seen that before. So you've got to be more extreme. So what it's creating is social acceptance. And so that's why smoking is in movies. And that's why it influences kids. Because it looks, oh, we're not on a ride of smoking. Maybe I should too. Right? It's a social acceptance issue. So, in the anti-smoking yet though, like I said, primes this negative attitude so it protects you. This slide shows it works. If the kids who saw smoking, the intent to smoke went from 20% to 40%. And that is a huge effect. That said they were interested in smoking? Doubled. And it went back to 20% if they saw the anti-smoking apps. So they were basically protected completely. So it was a really powerful thing. So what happened? Once this study came out, this had the most impact of all my research. The whole bunch of people, there were hearings in California where they brought up the movie executive and said, listen to Connie's research and Stan Glantz's research about how much smoking there is in movies. These are people in the state. This is our state industry. What are you doing? Stop it. You've got to stop the smoking. They had, the National Association of Attorneys Generals had meetings and hauled people in and yelled at them. The theater owners also demanded that there be less smoking in movies. So there was this huge normative influence to get this taken care of. There was an activist group form that's very active. They email me every week. They have a weekly conference called Trying to Get This Stopped. You may disagree, but they just think, you know, if you accept we can get this down. We're going to save millions of lives, ultimately. Can you just guess who sees our movies? The rest of the world sees our movies. Not just us. Okay, then the National Association of Theater Owners actually did start running anti-smoking ads in movies in theaters for free during the month, the quit smoking month, which is like February or something. So for a couple of years they did that. And then the biggest thing that happened was the California Department of Health Services, our California Department of Health Services, based on my research, which I've done in the state, they got all the movie theaters about a year ago to put anti-smoking ads on the DVDs of youth-oriented movies that had smoking. So every youth-oriented movie, like Reality Bites, that's on DVD now has an anti-smoking ad before it. And Schwarzenegger announced it. He was very much in favor. So that's a pretty major, it's not in theaters, but at least it's on the DVD. Whether people see it on the DVDs, I don't know. But even if you fast forward, you can kind of see it, right? I think that's a pretty major accomplishment for research because I have to tell you, most research goes nowhere. It has no impact on anything. And the movie, oh, here's another thing. The movie industry, after all this pressure, agreed movies with lots of smoking should be rated R. So they actually agreed to that. So if there's a lot of smoking in a movie, it makes it an R rating. Because remember, the whole reason they were using smoking is they couldn't use other R rated material, right? Like swear words, they couldn't use swear words, but they could use smoking. And we were thinking, huh, I'd rather have the swear word than the smoking, really, from the kid's perspective. And so they agreed that smoking is as bad as a swear word, and therefore it should be R. So whether it's still voluntary, so whether they actually do this is a different story. But there was a lot of smoking in kids' cartoons and stuff, right? And hopefully that'll go away, because that's kind of scary. A four-year-old seeing smoking, you know. Okay. And remember, I did smoke for a while. So not, and I've had PhD students, in fact, one of my students who published with me still smokes. I saw him. He lives in Korea now, and everyone smokes and says he can't quit. So I'm not, you know, I understand why people smoke. I just want to make sure that people who are leaning and maybe might not smoke, I'd rather persuade them not to then to do it. Okay. Final study is anti-smoking ads and TV shows. This just came out. So this is my most current study. I don't have it on my website yet. So have you ever seen a TV show for kids, like a sitcom kind of thing, that has an anti-smoking message in it? Do you see a lot of smoking in kids' TV shows? No. So in general, kids sitcoms, kids' TV shows, there's a rule in all the networks, no smoking. Okay. Unlike movies where it's, okay, it's free for all. On TV, kids' shows, no smoking. But then anti-smoking advocates said, you know, anti-smoking activists said, hmm, but that'd be a good way to educate kids to have a show that was anti-smoking. But the network said, no, because we have a rule, no smoking. So we can't have a show that's about smoking that's anti-smoking, because we don't allow any smoking on TV. So I said, huh, let's do this study and see if this might work, because they were very resistant. And there was a show that had been made and had aired only once, and it was on the TV show Clueless. Have you, do you know Clueless? It was still running on, at the time I did this, let me tell you, when you do a study, it takes a couple years to do the study, you analyze the data, then you write up the paper, then after it's accepted in the journal, it takes three years to get published. So this study was completely done three years before it was published, right? So these are, you think, huh, why is she using Clueless? That's an old show. Wow, because I did this study 10 years ago. Do you know what I'm saying? So you have to understand academics very slow in the publication. No, I guess they would be back on. Anyway, so there was a show I clueless only played once, none of my kids had seen it, in which they tried to create an anti-smoking episode where the girl, if you don't clueless the movie, right? There's a girl in high school, and she's beautiful, and some guy comes from France, and he's a model, and he's from France, so he smokes. And so she falls in love with him, and they date, and then, you know, basically she sees the effect of smoking on other people, and she sees how it hurts her, and she keeps trying to get him to quit, and he refuses to quit. And so she breaks up with him. So it's an anti-smoking show. So the question is, with that kind of show worker, are you better off just not showing and smoking on TV? Maybe that's the best to turn. So that was a really important question, and the industry asked me to do the study. So the thing is, the smoking is in the potline, you're gonna see a lot of smoking in the show, and you're gonna see a tract of people smoking. So maybe the subtle message is gonna be stronger than the anti-smoking message. Do you know what I'm saying? If you see any show with smoking, even if it's negative, it could be counterproductive. So that was the concern. And guess what? At the end of this show, they put an epilogue, and I'll show you the showing epilogue. So do you know what an epilogue is? What are you saying? Have you ever heard of entertainment education? It's a huge movement in Hollywood that puts socially important health messages in television shows. They just hadn't done it with smoking. But you see shows about AIDS, and you see shows about alcoholism. And those messages are purposefully placed as an educational tool. And at the end of these shows, they frequently have what's called an epilogue. So they go, by the way, this show was to help you learn about AIDS. If you want more information, here's a number to call. Have you seen these kinds of shows? Sometimes they have the epilogue, and sometimes they don't. Everyone always pushes for the epilogue because they think it reinforces the message, gives an 800 number. Some people think the epilogue's a bad idea, though, because it lets you know the show is educational. Do you know what I'm saying? And that might turn people off, otherwise they think, oh, that's just the real show. So the question was, is the epilogue good? Or is it going to turn people off, and they're going to go, oh, that was a government message? That's gross. I don't believe that message. Do you know what I'm saying? So, because I'll point you, the TV show was itself, right? So anyway, here's Clueless. She's got so much better at my own computer. But there's Alicia Silverstone. She was actually the original. This is not Alicia Silverstone. This is the person that's in the TV show. And whoever the French guy is, we're smoking. And she's kind of looking in and like, what are you doing? And then here's the 800 number and the characters from Clueless saying this was a show about smoking. If you need help quitting or need information, call this number. But it let everyone know it was an anti-smoking show. So let me ask, do you think it's a good idea or a bad idea to do this type of TV show? Yeah, so that's what I ended up showing. But everyone argued against that. But it turned out to be a good idea because people, a really strong negative message overshadows the positive imagery or the fact that people are smoking on TV. So it worked. How about the epilogue? Good idea or bad idea? Bad. People who are interested in smoking, which is about 20%, when they saw the epilogue, they were more likely to smoke after seeing the show. They got so mad the government was trying to tell them what to do that they said they were more likely to smoke after the show, which was an anti-smoking show. So it was not only neutral, it was counterproductive. Isn't that interesting? Because, well, by the way, product placements? Do you know what product placement is in a show? They fought so hard to not have this kind of stuff flagging product placements because they're worried about the exact same reaction. Product placements are, at the very end of the show, it'll roll like it'll say something, some product was provided by Coke, but you don't have like a big screen saying, you know, there were product placements in this TV show for Coke. You know what I'm saying? It's very, very, very subtle. Why? Because the industry doesn't like to flag product placements. They think people will react against it and go, oh, stop pushing your product in my TV show. What are you doing? So there's a huge fight to hide product placements and this explains why. Because the people who were counter to the message got really mad about this placement and they actually, it had the opposite effect. So it's kind of like a product placement when making less likely to use the product having seen this message. Okay, so how did I do this study? Well, as I said, I think I went through this whole thing. The experts disagreed on this. The reason it was so controversial is because many smokers is a pro smoking message. Attractive smokers is a pro smoking message. The criticism of smoking is the anti smoking message. So there's actually two positive messages for the one. But as I told you, this worked. It worked and lowered intent to smoke. The disapproval message is very strong but the epilogue was counterproductive. So I say, our study just was published. I don't know what kind of reaction this is going to have. I talked to people in the movie industry and they said they liked epilogue. They're not certain that they should get rid of the epilogue. So that's the funny thing. When I first started doing the research, as soon as I get data, people are going to listen to me. And now I'm learning that if they like what you say, they'll listen to you. And if they don't like what they say, they won't listen to you. So I'm not sure whether this is going to have much impact. Because when I called the original people, we asked me to do this study. They said, oh, we like those epilogue. We think they're helpful. So I don't know. There's honestly so much I could do. So what impact did the epilogue have on non-smokers? Nothing. Yeah. So no effect that the non-smokers didn't care. The only time the epilogue had an effect was when it was what we call counter-attitudinal. It told you something. It indicated the government was trying to get you to do something you didn't want to do. So it was that group that what we had, what we say called a head of reactants effect. So for other people, like if you see a government message, you know, to wear seat belts and you wear a seat belt, you don't care, right? But if you don't wear seat belts and all of a sudden you're getting told over and over wear seat belts, you might react and never ever wear a seat belt, you see? So the reactants occur from people who disagree with the message. Good question. Other questions about this? So I'm going to just go, let's see. So overall my conclusion is that you may know this, but anyway the government doesn't necessarily, because the government still focuses on health messages because most government campaigns are run by doctors and you know, people with a health background and they keep focusing on the fact that if you're trying to reach youth, they don't care about health. They care about socials. You have to give them social messages. And the government can reduce smoking by creating negative social perceptions about smoking, either using ads, movies or TV shows, you know? All of this will work. So the government can reduce smoking if they focus on the social direction when they're dealing with adolescents. With adults, they care about health messages because they're actually, you know, if you're 50 and your doctor tells you you might have a heart attack from smoking, you're going to stop most likely. But young people are not going to listen to that. So overall my final conclusions about management, if you notice, every one of my studies, I talk to people in the community. I talk to the government. I talk to the movie industry. I talk to advertisers. I said, what are your questions? I didn't always like my answers. But at least I asked questions that they cared about. So when you do research, or if you ever do research, we as a campus I think try very, very hard to do research that addresses real needs. And I think it matters. Because I think researchers can provide crucial answers to important questions. See, the kind of research I do is independent. So I can publish it. And there's no one paying me to get a certain answer. So it's an objective project. Projects are funded like ad testing. It's funded by the people who created the ads. So guess what? This is the ads work. Do you see what I'm saying? Most research is biased actually. And independent researchers are very rare. And the only ones that exist are universities pretty much. So I hope you guys will support research and don't get upset when your professors do research because it's important. We're the only people out there. And the US is pretty much the only university system that supports this type of research. And I'm not taking money from you. I'm taking money from smokers to do this research. So I hope you support research. And while you're here, try to get involved in research projects because I work with a lot of students who help me in all those schools at seven o'clock in the morning, undergraduates. They were all out there helping me plus the data. So if you have any questions, here's my email address. Here's my website, my name. And feel free to contact me. And we have a few minutes still. So does anyone have any questions, comments, suggestions for future research? I have a question. Going back to the ads that show the evil, corporate environment. Yes. When your research showed that they didn't work, why do you think people were still attached to them? Why were some states attached to them? Well, it's a very good idea. So the main people who run that was the Truth Campaign. And they had hired researchers to show that it worked. And those researchers had collected data showing it did work. So then it was their research against mine. So they did have some research. And my research doesn't show that it doesn't work at all. It just shows it's a weak effect. It was a statistically non-significant effect. You know, it wasn't as good as the other approaches. So I couldn't argue their research was counterproductive or did nothing. I just could say it was a weak effect relative to these other types. In general, the social messages help people either like health messages or they like the industry message. They really do not like the social message because the social message, for the most part, is a little bit subjective. And they don't really like to talk about social issues and ads. Marketers, of course, talk about social issues. Most ads have a social message, like image, but health people, they don't like the kind of message. So part of it is just the whole attitudes that they don't want to do like a subjective social message that might not be actually factually true. I always think of the Apple guy versus the Microsoft guy and the Microsoft guy's a weird guy and the Matt guy's cool. That's a very strong social message. It's not objectively true at all. It worked extremely well. It's not true. That would work great with smoking. But public health people don't like that kind of message because it's not factual. And it's not actually true. But you can't really say that smokers are uncool. So that's why they like the hurt other because there's some factual basis to that, but it was social too. So that's the only one that they like of all the social messages. But anyway, part of it was that Truth actually collected some data to suggest their approach works. And then it was their data versus mine. And they went out. They got more money than I did. Yes? Which advertising is the best for smokers? I did not study smokers because I was in fifth grade and sixth grade and that's what I was funded to do. So I never, I don't know. That would be a very interesting question. I haven't gotten funding. I asked to do further work but they decided to get the funding to someone else. So I think it might be very different. But I don't know the answer to that. Like I said, I focused on the youngest age group because that's what they wanted me to study. Yeah, other questions? Yes? You said earlier that UCI are university students and people involved in university are less likely to be smokers. Do you still think that is a problem at UCI or any other university? Yes, I mean there is still substantial smoking here at Irvine. Basically on campus here you can smoke in several places and there's a, some people want to try to so basically there's places where it's marked you can't smoke but people still smoke there. So it's not as big a problem here but it is a problem in certain sub-populations. Oddly enough for example there's just pockets of people like ballet dancers. Huge smoking rates. Why? Because it keeps them thin. It does objectively keep them thin to smoke because nicotine curbs your appetite. It's an objective factor to draw. So there are certain groups of students that tend to be high smokers. But as a whole we have much less of a problem at any college campus especially in Southern California. What do you think is the lowest smoking great state of the US? No, not unless they're pretty high actually. California is second or third? Utah lowest and then Hawaii in California like Utah. So the point is we're in a university setting that lowers the smoking rate. We're in California that lowers the smoking rate. We're in a very prestigious university where people are very competitive that lowers the smoking rate more. So you won't see as much smoking here but the people on campus still think there's a problem with certain groups in certain areas of campus where you basically expose the second hand to smoke or try to help in those small areas. But if you go to campus oh my gosh I guess it's just in China you couldn't, I mean you eat dinner, people are all smoking there's no no smoking spots it's just a completely different world there. That's when you think well really I guess we don't have too much of a problem here you see how it's all relative to what you see elsewhere the rest of the world is in France like although there's 40% of the students smoke in college you know where's here it's 10% so it's big yeah was there yes I think it's like North Carolina so basically so what the states that grow tobacco have a very high smoking rate yeah other do you ever teach lower education courses? I used to but now I keep, if he has to teach PhD courses so no one else could teach it but me and so recently I haven't taught but I haven't passed I just haven't in the last couple years but we have other really good professors other questions or you can come talk to me afterwards so thank you for coming