Electronic cigarette retailers use Pokémon Go to market products

Recently, we witnessed a new marketing strategy in which vape shops and online e-cigarette retailers have harnessed the popularity of the interactive smartphone game Pokemon Go to promote vaping products. This approach combines the strengths of recent and traditional strategies thought to be effective in promoting tobacco use to adolescents and young adults: (1) cartoons;1 tobacco product placement in video games2 ,3 and (2) interactive promotional contests.4 ,5 Pokemon Go (created by the game developer Niantic6) is an augmented reality videogame for smartphones that uses the phone's global positioning system (GPS) system to identify real-world locations containing a variety of different Pokemon (ie, cartoon creatures) that appear on the phone screen overlaid on a real-world background (figure 1). The game's primary goal is for the player to travel in the real world, capture Pokemon and send them into battle against other Pokemon at ‘gyms’. To facilitate gameplay, Niantic has designated numerous real-world locations as ‘PokeStops’ (ie, locations where users can obtain tools to increase their power). Figure 1 Smartphone screenshots of Pokemon images overlaid on real-world backgrounds (left panel: USC Department of Preventive Medicine; right panel: Los Angeles-based vape shop). The majority of these PokeStops have been repurposed from Ingress, Niantic's previous augmented …