Advertising Literacy: Teaching Young People to See Through Nicotine Marketing
Media literacy programs teach students to analyze and resist advertising. Applied to nicotine, they help young people recognize the marketing strategies that target them. Advertising literacy is one of the most promising—and underfunded—youth prevention approaches.
Show a teenager a ZYN influencer post and ask: Who made this? What are they trying to sell? Who is the target audience? What techniques are they using? The teenager who can answer these questions is less susceptible to the marketing—not because they've been warned about nicotine, but because they understand how advertising works. **Advertising literacy—teaching young people to analyze marketing critically—is one of the most effective and least utilized prevention strategies. It doesn't tell them what to think. It teaches them how to think about the messages that target them.**
