Concealing Decades of Smokescreens: PMI’s Unsmoke Campaign

In 2019, Philip Morris International (PMI) launched “The Year of Unsmoke,” a marketing campaign that claims to encourage smokers to quit by prompting them to switch from traditional cigarettes to next generation products. Yet PMI continues to work against tobacco control policies and produce billions of combustible cigarettes. The campaign is a tactic that is all too familiar in the tobacco industry: creating a façade of concern for health while marketing products that kill.

STOP has been monitoring PMI’s actions to see if they align with the stated goal of “unsmoking the world.”

• 2019: Brief with recommendations how to protect tobacco control policies from industry influence
• 2020: Timeline of PMI’s activities during its first year of the Unsmoke campaign
• 2022: Progress report on PMI’s Unsmoke activities
• 2023: Blog exposing PMI’s smoke-free myths