FDA’s New Anti-Tobacco Campaign to Reach Hip-Hop Youth

The public education initiative dubbed “Fresh Empire” is designed to help hip-hop youth avoid tobacco.

October 07, 2015

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has launched a national public education campaign called Fresh Empire, to prevent and reduce tobacco use among multicultural youth who identify with the hip-hop peer crowd—a group the agency says is hard to reach for anti-tobacco education.

While multicultural teens identify with more than one group, the FDA is focusing on those in the hip-hop peer crowd because research estimates that they are more likely to use tobacco than other youth.

Fresh Empire includes interactive marketing strategies such as traditional paid media, engagement through multiple digital platforms, and outreach at the local level with the help of local DJs, musicians and artists. The ads will reinforce that tobacco use is not a part of the hip-hop lifestyle and will air nationally in conjunction with the 2015 BET Hip-Hop Awards on October 13.

During a media call, Mitch Zeller, director of the FDA Center for Tobacco Products, commented that Fresh Empire does not address electronic cigarettes directly because the FDA does not have regulatory authority over the products. However, he noted that FDA is moving through the rulemaking process to bring e-cigarettes under FDA’s purview, and that the research process for a youth prevention campaign specific to e-cigarettes has begun.

Back in March 2014, NACS issued a statement of position that encouraged stores selling e-cigarettes to adopt, as a best practice, a policy of treating these products as age-restricted, subjecting them to the same age-verification procedures as those applicable to tobacco products.

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