The Advertising Standards Authority today swung its firepower to bear on the e-cigarette industry, banning TV ads from four producers that it said misled consumers.

All four ads – among the first wave of TV ads for e-cigs – were found guilty of not making it clear what their products were. It seems the e-cig makers got tangled up over rule 10.4 of the Advertising Code. It’s worth quoting this little number in full:

“If it shares a name, emblem or other feature with a tobacco product, a non-tobacco product or service may be advertised only if the advertisement is obviously directly targeted at an adult audience, makes or implies no reference to smoking or to a tobacco product, does not promote tobacco or smoking and does not include a design, colour, imagery, logo style or the like that might be associated in the audience’s mind with a tobacco product.”

Which is a bit of a stumbling block if your product looks like a cigarette, is spelt like ‘cigarette’ but with an ‘e’ stuck on the front, and – oh yes – happens to contain nicotine. (For the record, two of the products in the banned ads contained nicotine – E-Lites and Ten Motives – while the other two – 5 Colors and Sky Cigs – did not.)

To avoid any suggestion they were promoting tobacco or smoking, the banned adverts veered in the other direction – a little too far, in the ASA’s opinion.

E-Lites’s rather clever offering featured a man going for a smoke and missing a baby perform a dance routine (because the ad could not refer to the act of smoking, the man simply taps a fag-box shape in his shirt pocket to explain where he is going). The strapline, “What are you missing?” plays on the idea that you don’t have to miss unrepeatable events in your living room if you’re puffing away on an e-cigarette.

The unbelievably naff ad for 5 Colors, meanwhile, showed young people bouncing in the air alongside exploding fruit. Quite what this has to do with e-cigarettes is anyone’s guess. In both cases, you had to go to the brands’ websites to find out more – a compromise the ASA deemed unacceptable: “We considered it important that ads such as this made clear the nature of the product being advertised and stated whether or not it contained nicotine.”

What we’re looking at here is a type of advertising catch-22: the e-cigarette makers were told they couldn’t say what their products were – and then had their ads banned for not, um, saying what their products were.

The ASA admits advertising in this area is “complex and challenging”, but says there’s nothing in the Code to prevent, say, a voiceover or on-screen text saying that the product is an e-cig.

Adrian Everett, CEO of E-Lite maker Zandera, said today: “We are very disappointed with this decision. We spent 12 months working closely with Clearcast to create this advert… We need to continue to work with the regulators to both educate and persuade them about the benefits of electronic cigarettes to the smoking community.”

In truth, we’re watching the growing pains of a category that is still defining itself. From 2016, e-cigs will be regulated as medicine, but until then, expect to see many more runners and riders entering the field – and many more clashes of this type. It will be fascinating to watch.

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