ASA Rules on Apollo Vapes

The advertising regulation body visited www.apolloecigs.co.uk, an online vape vendor, on 17 January 2024. As with other similar cases, it discovered a section titled “Affiliate Program” that stated: “1.Online Affiliates If you have a website (or other online marketing channels) that can help promote Apollo products and send traffic to our website, you can use your website to indirectly generate sales. You will receive your own unique URL which will automatically track all sales generated from your website. We even provide you with banner ads and text links that you can just choose, copy & paste”. Text below stated, “Click here to create an Apollo affiliate account”.

Again, as with similar cases, the Advertising Standards Authority challenged itself as to whether the advert breached the Advertising Code by “irresponsibly encouraging the promotion of e-cigarettes and related components online, because unlicensed nicotine-containing e-liquids and their components could not be promoted in online media”.

The Advertising Standards Authority wrote to Apollo Future Technology Ltd t/a Apollo Vapes UK. The vape company replied to say they had removed the affiliate page from their website.

Apollo Vapes explained that their affiliate programme worked with product review websites, which were aimed at adult vape users. They reviewed products and ranked them. They did not believe they breached UK regulations by allowing those sites to review their products but said they would stop working with them if that was the case.

The Advertising Standards Authority said: “The ad was not for specific named e-cigarette or vaping products, and as such we considered it did not have the direct effect of promoting unlicensed nicotine-containing e-cigarettes. We therefore assessed whether the ad had the indirect effect of promoting such products.”

But…the Advertising Standards Authority said the affiliate program “encouraged people to become Apollo Affiliates, who in turn would promote the sale of e-cigarettes and their components on the advertiser’s behalf on social media. Consequently, the restriction that applied to online media under rule 22.12 was applicable. We therefore considered that this meant the ad had the indirect effect of promoting the sale of nicotine-containing e-cigarettes and their components, which were not licensed as medicines in online media, by means of the affiliate programme. We further considered that by encouraging people to promote the sale of such products on social media, the ad incited prospective affiliates to breach the Code and the legislative ban contained in the TRPR.”

The Advertising Standards Authority told the company that the ad must not appear again in the form investigated and to ensure that future marketing communications “must not have the direct or indirect effect of promoting nicotine-containing e-cigarettes and their components, for example through the advertising of affiliate schemes”. 

Photo Credit:

• Vapes Photo by Sierra Alpha Juliet on Unsplash

Dave Cross

Journalist at POTV

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Dave is a freelance writer; with articles on music, motorbikes, football, pop-science, vaping and tobacco harm reduction in Sounds, Melody Maker, UBG, AWoL, Bike, When Saturday Comes, Vape News Magazine, and syndicated across the Johnston Press group. He was published in an anthology of “Greatest Football Writing”, but still believes this was a mistake. Dave contributes sketches to comedy shows and used to co-host a radio sketch show. He’s worked with numerous start-ups to develop content for their websites.