About

Why TERM?

Exposure to tobacco marketing increases tobacco use, and youth are particularly susceptible. Article 13 of the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control recommends comprehensively banning tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship (TAPS). However, the internet offers new avenues for tobacco to be promoted directly to consumers with less oversight than other media channels—providing a significant challenge to curbing tobacco advertising globally.

Vital Strategies’ Tobacco Enforcement and Reporting Movement (TERM) is a digital media monitoring system that provides evidence of tobacco marketing on social media platforms and news sites. Vital Strategies collects and analyzes data on the volume and type of tobacco marketing, which is then presented through situation reports and in-depth special reports on emerging issues. These reports provide governments, advocates and key stakeholders with critical data that can be used to inform tobacco control policymaking, particularly laws on tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship. TERM is currently operating in India, Indonesia and Mexico.

Methodology

TERM summarizes information gathered by an artificial intelligence-driven monitoring tool from publicly available posts on social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok, and from online media articles collected via LexisNexis. Instances of tobacco marketing are identified using keyword-based queries and through the regular monitoring of social media accounts that were identified purposively via input from tobacco control experts, market research data and keyword searches. Data coding is first conducted automatically and is then reviewed by Vital Strategies researchers using a theory-driven codebook.
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TERM History

TERM began in India in 2019 as a Facebook campaign page that crowdsourced user-submitted instances of tobacco marketing. As an extension to the Facebook campaign, Vital Strategies launched a digital media monitoring system in 2020 that summarized data from India in the form of monthly situation reports. TERM expanded to Indonesia in 2021 and Mexico in 2022.

TERM is a project of Vital Strategies’ Tobacco Control Program. To learn more about our tobacco control work, please visit the Vital Strategies website.

TERM by Vital Strategies is a first-of-its-kind tool that monitors and reports cases of online tobacco marketing to support the introduction, strengthening and enforcement of tobacco control policies.