The 13th World Conference on Tobacco OR Health

Objective: to quantify the appearance of scenes with tobacco or its related products and its characteristics (sex, age, socioeconomic level of the smoker, reasons for smoking, places where they smoked, cigarette brands, etc).

Methods: it is a descriptive survey in which 4 observers (health professionals) separately watched two famous soap operas for one hour a day for seven days. They were broadcasted on Prime time at the same time in the most watched TV channels. They evaluated the scenes with previously established parameters and then they analyzed them in an excel data base.

Results: tobacco presence was found in 38.4% of the scenes (10.1 scenes daily). The scenes were only related with visual appearance of cigarettes, neither verbal allusion nor brands. A 85.6% of the smokers were men, most of them main actors; the most common age range was from 20 to 44 years, both for men and women; and the majority belonged to the medium socioeconomic level. A 75% of the scenes with smokers were filmed indoors. The main reasons for smoking were stress, happiness, social sharing and for relaxing.

Comments: there is a high presence of tobacco related scenes and a high acceptability of its use in the observed soap operas. This seems to be a very good strategy of the tobacco industry to make indirect marketing. In the context of a future new law in Chile that will not allow the tobacco promotion, marketing through television programs will probably increase.