Motivation


Since the advent of modern advertising in the 1920s, tobacco marketers have worked to develop convert young audiences into smokers by inundating mainstream media channels like movies and magazines with their persuasive messaging. As the health risks associated with smoking became increasingly evident, however, marketing restrictions were enacted on the tobacco industry to reduce their influence on cigarette purchasing behavior. In 1971, "Big Tobacco" was forced to shift their marketing efforts from broadcast to print media when a ban on cigarette advertising on TV and radio went into effect in the United States. The Master Settlement Agreement of 1998 later placed further restrictions on cigarette advertising, including practices that specifically targeted individuals under the age of 18. Since then, nearly every tobacco marketing dollar has been funneled to reaching existing and prospective tobacco customers at one of the last places they're able to influence purchasing behavior: point-of-sale tobacco (POST) vendors (including convenience stores, grocery stores, and gas stations).

In it's most recent Cigarette Report, the Federal Trade Commission found that tobacco marketing expenditure in the United States now amounts to about $1 million per hour. The rise in combined annual budgets, from $8.30 billion in 2015 to $8.71 billion in 2016, was driven primarily by payments to cigarette retailers and wholesalers to reduce the price of cigarettes experienced by end consumers. As evidenced by this vast marketing spend, existing and potential tobacco consumers are vulnerable to the influence of advertising at the point-of-sale. The association between POST exposure and harmful smoking behavior, especially with respect to school-age populations, is well documented. According to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, nearly 90% of adult smokers had their first cigarettes before the age of 18.

POST advertising is an embedded element of the urban landscape of New York City. It's comprised of a variety of marketing practices including signs on the insides and outsides of retail stores, and has a more immediate and comprehensive effect on tobacco sales than any other marketing channel. There is substantial evidence of disparity in the way tobacco products are advertised at the point of sale depending on the community demographic profile of focus. Tobacco manufacturers have long targeted minority and lower income populations in particular, mainly through this sort of tailored advertising. The goal of this project is to map POST marketing practices across New York City (NYC) using an automated method of detecting and classifying tobacco signage. In comparing the POST landscape with socioeconomic characteristics at the neighborhood level, we also aim to explore marketing disparities and variable exposure of communities to tobacco advertisements.

An important question in the field of Urban Health, both theoretically and empirically, asks which aspects of the cityscape are constantly changing, and under what circumstances. In his seminal work on urban spatial perception, "The Image of the City", American urban theorist Kevin Lynch posits that the city is “the product of many builders who are constantly modifying the structure for reasons of their own…”. That structure - the continually inhabited and constantly traversed space of the city - is a “social morphology” which greatly influences the social consequences of living in the city.