[mcv]

Advertising is definitely a lot more complex than simply: spend more money on it -> sales go up.

When tobacco ads were banned, tobacco companies started making more profit, because they had to spend less on advertising. Turned out their advertising was mostly to steal customers from each other, and didn't really lure in new users. So the ban actually helped them.

[jefftk]

Short-term, yes. Long-term, I think no? Tobacco advertising typically focused on making smoking cigarettes seem cool and glamorous, and banning the ads may well have been a large component of why it no longer seems so.

[logifail]

> Tobacco advertising typically focused on making smoking cigarettes seem cool and glamorous, and banning the ads may well have been a large component of why it no longer seems so

That's one hypothesis. Another is that we've known for ages that tobacco smoke causes disease[0] since[1]

> Lung cancer was once a very rare disease, so rare that doctors took special notice when confronted with a case, thinking it a once-in-a-lifetime oddity. Mechanisation and mass marketing towards the end of the 19th century popularised the cigarette habit, however, causing a global lung cancer epidemic. Cigarettes were recognised as the cause of the epidemic in the 1940s and 1950s, with the confluence of studies from epidemiology, animal experiments, cellular pathology and chemical analytics. Cigarette manufacturers disputed this evidence, as part of an orchestrated conspiracy to salvage cigarette sales. Propagandising the public proved successful, judging from secret tobacco industry measurements of the impact of denialist propaganda. As late as 1960 only one-third of all US doctors believed that the case against cigarettes had been established. The cigarette is the deadliest artefact in the history of human civilisation. Cigarettes cause about 1 lung cancer death per 3 or 4 million smoked, which explains why the scale of the epidemic is so large today. Cigarettes cause about 1.5 million deaths from lung cancer per year

and the world finally woke up to that.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/basic_information/health_effects... [1] https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/21/2/87