I think we all have some level of distrust in big tobacco companies, despite how strongly they’re trying to persuade us that they’ve changed their ways. Maybe they have, maybe they haven’t. But Philip Morris just recently put out a call for creatives and communications experts to help them create a smoke-free world.

At The Cannes Festival of Creativity, Marian Salzman, the Senior Vice President of Communications at Philip Morris International asked the creative community to join them “in raising awareness of the potential of science, technology, and innovation for those who smoke and the people around them.”

In response to this, via a press release, the Chief Operating Officer Jacek Olczak said that “Quitting tobacco and nicotine remains the best option for smokers, but for those who don’t, science-based non-combustible alternatives are a better choice than continuing to use cigarettes.”

Clearly, they are trying to promote vaping over smoking.

I don’t know exactly what this means, but at least one communications company out of Europe, Emakina Group, has joined the initiative. Emakina’s CEO is quoted on PMI’s website as saying “A smoke-free future for the whole company? Challenge accepted. And you know what? Let’s start now!”

As far as I can tell, this is mostly a marketing campaign designed to change the view that people have of the PMI brand, which is obviously very negative since they’re a tobacco company. A lot of brands actually do marketing campaigns like this, for example, AXE body spray who was known for their sexist commercials started running brand perception campaigns in 2014 to move away from the negative views that the general public had of them. And it works over time, as long as the brand is authentic.

The problem here is that while Philip Morris is trying to promote a smoke-free world by switching smokers to vaping, they still sell cigarettes. I’ve talked about this a little before. It’s true that they still sell cigarettes, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want a smoke-free world. They are a big long-running business with stakeholders and lots of employees. They can’t just stop selling cigarettes or the business will die. But if they slowly replace their smoking customers with vaping customers, over time, it might actually be possible to stop selling cigarettes.

That’s probably a long ways away, but it’s possible.

Maybe PMI really does believe in this new message and this marketing strategy is just the seed that starts them on the process of reaching their end goal.

They are asking that for any agencies interested in joining their cause, to contact Marian Salzman at [email protected]

What do you all think about this?

Do you think Philip Morris is trying to do the right thing? Do you think they really care?

Or maybe this is just PMI looking towards the future and realizing that cigarettes are a dying market and they need to make a shift to stay in business. And if that’s the case, does it really matter, since either way it will be better for the well-being of the world?

As you probably know, there was a massive push to get vapers to submit their comments to the FDA regarding their proposed rulemaking which could ban e-juice flavors. The deadline is over, so I hope you submitted a comment!

I want to thank Brent Stafford of Regulator Watch for breaking this story but I just want to share the quick version and some of my own thoughts.

So as of July 9th, there have been more than 517,000 comments submitted, but according to the FDA, nearly 60% of them are spam comments that are mostly anti-vaping. The FDA reported that somewhere around June 8th, someone launched a spam bot that hit their servers with more than 255,000 comments, which lasted for four days, until June 11th.

Most of these comments are variations of the same 10 comments, so the bot was submitting randomized comments at a massive rate to the comment form. They are nearly all marked as anonymous and have acronyms in the organization field that implicate the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.

Currently, it’s not known who is behind this spam campaign, but whoever did it appears to be trying to make it look like it’s from the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, due to the similarities in the language of the comments and the letter that Tobacco-Free Kids sent to the FDA.

It’s really not that difficult for a single person to run a bot or hire someone for cheap to run a bot for them to do something like this. It’s hard to believe that this is an official campaign thought up by an anti-tobacco organization, but it could be a rogue anti-vaping extremist acting on their own.

Either way, the FDA has stopped the flood of comments, but it crushed their servers and has drastically reduced the ability for federal employees to review and approve comments.

The FDA has also said that they haven’t decided what to do with the comments yet or if they will even keep any of the comments, legitimate or not. There are discussions online saying that the FDA isn’t required to start the commenting period over, so they could throw out everything and pass whatever regulations they were likely to pass anyway, which in reality may have been the case all along.

Whether this hurts us in the end or if it didn’t even matter, there’s one thing this tells me. The other side is scared. They see the massive amount of support that the vape community is putting into fighting these proposed rules and they went for the most desperate response they could come up with. If we can keep up with our advocacy efforts, no matter how dire the future looks, eventually we can win.