This study examined the specificity of the association between cigarette advertising and teen smoking in a cross-sectional survey conducted in 2008 with 3415 German schoolchildren aged 10–17 years. The survey used masked images of six cigarette brands and eight other commercial products. The prevalence of ever smoking was 31.1% and that of current smoking was 7.4%; 35.3% of never smokers were susceptible to smoking. Ad recognition rates ranged from 15% for a regionally advertised cigarette brand to 99% for a sweet. Lucky Strike and Marlboro were the most highly recognised cigarette brands (with ad recognition rates of 55% and 34%, respectively). After controlling for a range of established influences on smoking behaviours, the adjusted ORs for having tried smoking were 1.97 for the highest amount of exposure to cigarette ads compared with adolescents with the least exposure to cigarette ads, 2.90 for current smoking, and 1.79 for susceptibility to smoking among never smokers. Exposure to ads for commercial products other than cigarettes was significantly associated with smoking in crude but not multivariate models.
