According to their 1998 agreement with the attorneys general of 46 states, the four largest U.S. tobacco companies are prohibited from using advertising that targets people younger than 18. But HBS assistant professor Charles King (with physician Michael Siegel of Boston University's School of Public Health) found that the agreement has had little effect.

In their article in the New England Journal of Medicine last August, King and Siegel analyzed trends in expenditures for advertising between 1995 and 2000 by examining fifteen specific brands of cigarettes and the exposure of young people to cigarette advertising in 38 magazines. Cigarette brands were defined as "youth" brands if they were smoked by more than 5 percent of the smokers in eighth, tenth, and twelfth grades; magazines were classified as "youthoriented" if at least 15 percent of their readers were 12 to 17 years old.

The authors noted, among other things, that last year, magazine advertising for the three cigarette brands most popular with young people on average reached more than 80 percent of American youth seventeen times per brand. King and Siegel concluded that "the Master Settlement Agreement with the tobacco industry appears to have had little effect on cigarette advertising in magazines and on the exposure of young people to these advertisements."

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