Jiaxin Li, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Queensland's National Centre for Youth Substance Use Research, has uncovered a sobering gap in Australia's approach to keeping young people away from vaping: nearly half of the country's education campaigns fail to tell people what they should actually do to stay vape-free.
The discovery matters because vaping among youth has become a major public health concern across Australia, and media campaigns are one of the government's primary tools for reaching young people. Yet if those campaigns don't provide clear, actionable steps, their impact may be limited. Li's research, published in the journal Tobacco Control, analyzed all 24 publicly available vaping education campaigns launched in Australia between May 2021 and May 2025—a comprehensive snapshot of how the country has been messaging about e-cigarettes to its young people.
The study found that most campaigns do excel at warning about vaping's dangers. They highlight health risks, nicotine addiction, and exposure to harmful chemicals effectively. But the research revealed a critical weakness: almost half of the 24 campaigns contained vague or absent guidance on how to actually prevent vaping or quit the habit. In other words, they told young people what not to do without showing them how to do it.
There's another unintended consequence hiding in the data. More than half of Australia's vaping campaigns portrayed e-cigarettes as equally or more harmful than traditional cigarettes, and many framed vaping as a gateway to smoking. Li's analysis suggests this messaging could backfire. When campaigns make vaping seem as risky as smoking, they may inadvertently make smoking appear less dangerous by comparison—or worse, convince young people that smoking is an inevitable next step if they've already tried vaping.
The campaigns Li examined covered eight core themes: health effects, nicotine addiction, harmful chemicals, social norms, flavors, environmental impact, industry manipulation, and financial impact. The strength of this research is its specificity about what's actually working and what's not in the Australian landscape right now.
Li points to what the strongest campaigns could include instead. Rather than focusing solely on long-term health consequences, campaigns should emphasize short-term impacts that matter to young people today—social pressure, cost, how vaping affects daily performance and well-being, and industry tactics designed to target them. Equally important is practical behavioral guidance: How do you refuse a vape when a friend offers it? How do you manage cravings? The research suggests campaigns should also give parents, schools, and community members clearer language for talking with young people about vaping.
The significance of this work extends beyond critique. Li and her team have created a detailed blueprint for improvement, giving governments, health organizations, and community groups concrete evidence about what their campaigns should include. As young people increasingly consume information through digital channels and grow up in more diverse communities, messages need to be both culturally relevant and practically useful.
This research reveals that good intentions aren't enough. Australian vaping education campaigns have been built with genuine concern for youth health, but evidence-based redesign could make them far more effective—by telling young people not just what to avoid, but how to navigate a world where vaping is aggressively marketed to them.