[chii]

It's a feedback loop - smoking was advertised as being cool way back when, which led to movie characters smoking to appear cool, which then reinforces the advertising.

When there was a push to regulate smoking in advertising, it cut the original feedback loop which made film/tv characters not use smoking as a sign of being cool. This led to advertising (if it were allowed) to be less effective at portrayal of coolness via smoking.

It's not a simple one-to-one cause and effect.

[Retric]

Vaping took off as a cool thing without a bunch of cool people vaping in movies.

People stopped smoking in movies at the same time a lot of other smoking related things changed. Similarly smokers likely notice people smoking in movies more than non smokers.

[jennyholzer]

I remember a viral twitter photo of Sophie Turner smoking a Juul while filming the last episodes of Game of Thrones

Juul changed the cultural standing of vaping and (for a very brief moment of time) made it "cool" by means of social media celebrity promotion. They were hit with pretty aggressive punishment for this by the US FDA if I'm not mistaken.

[Retric]

Juul was founded in May 22, 2015 well after Vaping was in a fairly flat growth trajectory, and afterwards there wasn’t any kind of noticeable bump in adoption from such efforts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_cigarette#/media/Fi...

All the exponential curve stuff happened early on the path from 0 to ~10 of million.