Vape advertising and marketing rules in the UK explained

Vaping products are legal to sell to adults in the UK, but where and how they can be advertised is far more restricted than most people assume. Some of those restrictions are hard law, others are enforced through the advertising industry’s own codes, but in practice they combine to shut off most of the advertising channels a typical consumer brand would use. This explainer sets out what the rules actually say, not how to work around them.

Television and radio: an outright ban

Advertising e-cigarettes and refill containers on television and radio has been banned in the UK since 20 May 2016, when the Tobacco Products Directive was implemented into UK law through changes to the Broadcasting Code and the BCAP Code (the UK Code of Broadcast Advertising). This is not a grey area or a voluntary restriction: broadcasters are legally prohibited from carrying adverts for nicotine e-cigarettes, and the same rule extends to programme sponsorship that has the aim or effect of promoting such products. Ofcom enforces the Broadcasting Code and the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) enforces the BCAP Code, so a vape brand cannot pay to sponsor a TV programme or buy a radio ad slot in the way it could for most other consumer products.

Press, cinema and paid online ads: also mostly closed

Outside broadcast, advertising is governed by the CAP Code (the UK Code of Non-broadcast Advertising), specifically Section 22, which deals with electronic cigarettes. Rule 22.12 prohibits advertising unlicensed, nicotine-containing e-cigarettes and their components in a specific list of non-broadcast media: newspapers, magazines, email marketing, banner ads, paid-for search advertising and other paid-for online content. Because almost no vaping product in the UK is licensed as a medicine by the MHRA, in practice this rule closes off the great majority of conventional paid advertising space for nicotine vapes, not just a narrow slice of it.

Point-of-sale advertising inside a shop, such as till-area signage or in-store display material, sits outside this specific prohibition and remains permitted, provided it still complies with the separate rules on under-18 appeal covered below. This is one reason vape marketing in the UK looks so different from other consumer categories: shop displays and packaging carry much more of the weight than press or broadcast campaigns do.

Social media and online marketing

The same Section 22 restrictions extend to social media, and this is the area the ASA has been most active in enforcing recently. Its guidance is that vape ads cannot appear in any online media where content is actively pushed to people who have not sought it out themselves. That rules out paid display advertising on any platform, and it also rules out algorithmically distributed promotional posts from brand or retailer accounts on platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and TikTok, since those posts are surfaced to people who never chose to follow or search for that content.

What is still allowed is narrower than many retailers expect: factual, non-promotional information published on a marketer’s own website or its own privately run social media account. The word “factual” is doing real work here; product listings and genuine information are permitted, but marketing messaging, promotional offers and anything designed to persuade rather than inform are not. CAP has issued a formal Enforcement Notice to the vaping industry specifically over ads and promotional content appearing on TikTok, putting brands and retailers on notice to stop immediately or face sanctions.

Influencer marketing is largely off-limits

Because promotional content that reaches people who did not seek it out is restricted regardless of who posts it, paid influencer partnerships promoting a vape brand or product generally fall foul of the same rules as a brand posting directly, since an influencer’s content is typically distributed to followers and, via recommendation algorithms, to non-followers too. The ASA has been escalating action against non-compliant influencers more broadly, including using its own paid advertising to highlight repeated rule-breaking directly to an influencer’s audience, and referring persistent offenders to enforcement partners. A separate 2025 ASA report on influencer disclosure compliance found a substantial proportion of sponsored content across Instagram and TikTok still failing to meet basic ad disclosure requirements, which is a wider problem than vaping alone but leaves vape-related influencer content particularly exposed to scrutiny given the category-specific restrictions on top.

Rules that apply regardless of the medium

Even in the channels where some vape advertising is permitted, such as point of sale or a brand’s own website, content-level rules under the CAP Code still apply, aimed specifically at limiting appeal to under-18s:

• Ads must not feature anyone who is, or appears to be, under 25 playing a significant role or shown using an e-cigarette.
• Ads must not include anything likely to be of particular appeal to under-18s, which the ASA has interpreted to include youth culture references, characters or imagery popular with children, and celebrities with strong appeal to a young audience.
• No medium should be used to advertise e-cigarettes if more than 25% of its audience is under 18, and outdoor advertising near schools is subject to particular scrutiny for this reason.

These content rules exist for broadly the same reason as the age of sale itself: limiting the appeal of vaping to people who are not legally allowed to buy it. That underage-appeal concern runs through UK vaping policy generally, and it is the same reasoning behind the strict age-verification enforcement we cover in our guide to Trading Standards and underage vape sales, and behind the removal of the disposable format most associated with underage use, covered in our explainer on the UK disposable vape ban.

What this means in practice for retailers

In our view, the realistic advertising toolkit available to a compliant UK vape retailer is narrower than for most retail categories: in-store point-of-sale material, a brand or shop website limited to factual product information, and organic content on privately run social accounts that stops short of promotional messaging. Broadcast advertising is not an option at all, and paid press, display and search advertising for nicotine-containing products are closed off by the CAP Code in the same way. Retailers working with influencers or running social campaigns should treat the current ASA enforcement activity as a live risk rather than a theoretical one, given the scale of monitoring now in place.

None of this is enforced by a single body acting alone. Ofcom and the ASA cover broadcast; the ASA and CAP cover non-broadcast and online; and Trading Standards can become involved where advertising overlaps with underage sales or non-compliant stock. Anyone marketing vaping products commercially should treat the CAP and BCAP codes, published by the Committee of Advertising Practice, as the primary reference rather than general assumptions carried over from other product categories.