Check 21 | Youth Prevention Program
Introduction
As a brand committed to its mission of eliminating cigarettes and helping smokers transition to a healthier lifestyle, AIRSCREAM UK is deeply concerned about youth vaping. Therefore, we have taken proactive steps to ensure our products are not available to youths or non-smokers. We fully support laws and regulations prohibiting the sale of our products to anyone under the legal age in the respective countries where they can be found.
Initiatives
Given the nature of our products, we take seriously our commitment to market them responsibly and only to adults. We have taken the following initiatives to prevent underaged access to AIRSCREAM UK products:
- Being actively compliant with vaping legislations in countries where our products are available. All our products are clearly labelled with:
- “Only to be used by adult smokers”
- Health & Safety warnings, printed voluntarily even in countries where they are not mandatory.
- AIRSCREAM UK’s product packaging is intentionally designed to target adults by being primarily text-driven with little to no imagery.
- Age-restricting our website on initial access and requiring further age verification at checkout to ensure youths cannot purchase our products online. Although the legal age for smoking/vaping in the UK is 18 and above, as a global entity, AIRSCREAM UK has opted to set the minimum age for non-UK customers as 21 and above to close potential loopholes that might arise from international transactions.
- Our marketing activities are targeted only at existing smokers and e-cigarette users who are above legal age. Consequently, all our marketing material reflects this. All models that appear in our marketing images and videos are of legal vaping age. Content partners are required to clearly indicate age warnings in all reviews of AIRSCREAM UK products. Third parties such as distributors producing advertisements in countries where they are permitted are also required to place an age warning in their ad designs.
- Actively supporting anti-smoking programmes and citing only peer-reviewed academic studies and government programmes in our support of vaping as a quit tool.
- Refuse any partnership or collaboration proposals that specifically target youths, such as university students, even if they are legally adults.
Responsible marketing on social media platforms
With the growth of digital marketing and social media platforms, online channels are increasingly vital to engage with adult consumers. Our commitment to preventing underage vaping continues to drive the way we market and promote our brand. To accomplish that, we have taken the following measures:
- We only engage with content creators and promoters of legal age for product reviews and videos on platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. These third parties are also required to restrict their followers to individuals of legal age.
- All of our official online platform and social media platform includes statements such as “Must be of legal vaping age”.
- We restrict our email marketing only to individuals who self-identify as being of legal age and who smoke or use e-cigarettes products and have opted into our newsletter.
- By nature, e-cigarette products are not eligible for any form of paid online advertising, be it on Facebook, Instagram or via Google Ad Words. Although AIRSCREAM UK maintains these channels for its own organic engagement, the vast majority of our marketing posts often only depict our product without any embellishments. Where vaping is clearly shown, only adults are featured.
Lastly, we do our utmost to promote the Preventing Underaged Vaping Initiative among our stakeholders and commercial partners to maximise its positive influence. We encourage all our commercial partners and retailers that sell our products to require potential customers to show a valid ID as proof of legal age before completing the purchase and verbally advise customers that AIRSCREAM UK products only be used by adults and to avoid using it in the presence of minors.