By: Muhammad Abdullah Musharraf

How Pakistan’s newest nicotine pouch campaigns are using celebrity endorsement and old tobacco marketing tactics to reach the young

In continuation of the piece on how Pakistan’s youngest generation is being drawn into nicotine, this is what has happened since. A new campaign has landed, from a different agency, for a different brand, but built from the same mould. BBDO Pakistan’s digital push for ZYN carries the line “Find your reason, find your Zyn.” Months earlier, it was Mahira Khan, Wahaj Ali, and Meher Jaffri fronting a Velo campaign urging Pakistanis to “level up to smoke-free.” Two brands, two agencies, one script. The question worth asking is whether existing regulatory frameworks have kept pace with the rapid evolution of tobacco and nicotine products and their marketing.

There’s a reason the ZYN video feels familiar. Tobacco marketing has used this exact formula before: campaigns built around identity, self-expression and belonging, aimed less at adult users switching products and more at a younger audience discovering who they are. A German court banned Philip Morris’s “Be Marlboro” campaign in 2013 after concluding that its identity-driven messaging appealed to teenagers and encouraged them to smoke, in violation of the country’s tobacco advertising law. What’s changed this time isn’t the formula. It’s the product wearing it, and the fact that a familiar, trusted local face is now doing the work an anonymous cigarette ad used to do.

A market building itself faster than the law can move

Pakistan is not a peripheral market for this industry, it is a flagship one. Within five years of nicotine pouches entering the country, Pakistan became the third-largest market in the world for Velo, behind only two other countries. One brand alone captured 85 percent of that market, sold for roughly 133 rupees a can, cheaper than a pack of cigarettes and within easy reach of a teenager’s pocket money. British American Tobacco reported selling 8.3 billion nicotine pouches globally in 2024, roughly double what it sold just two years earlier, and Pakistan is one of the markets driving that curve upward. A regulatory review of the Pakistani market published by TobaccoIntelligence in April 2026 spells out what “unregulated” actually means here: nicotine pouches are classified as ordinary consumer goods rather than tobacco products, which means no minimum purchase age is enforced at retail, no license is required to sell them, there is no cap on permitted nicotine content, and neither their advertising nor their flavours face any restriction at all.

Pakistan’s own health ministry has confirmed as much on the record. According to a National Assembly question-hour reply reported by Alternative Research Initiative (ARI) Pakistan, the ministry stated that Velo is classified as a non-tobacco product and therefore falls outside its regulatory mandate, while adding that the Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan has analysed nicotine pouches and has not recommended their use, since nicotine is highly addictive. The product has already reached a monthly sales volume in the tens of millions. The regulatory conversation is still at the stage of deciding who is responsible for having it.

The TAPS gap, and what closing it has looked like elsewhere

Pakistan already has a working example of how to regulate a product like this, it simply doesn’t apply here yet. Cigarettes are covered by the Prohibition of Smoking and Protection of Non-Smokers’ Health Ordinance, which restricts advertising and mandates pictorial health warnings. Nicotine pouches sold under trade names like Velo and Zyn sit entirely outside that ordinance, because the law was written around tobacco leaf, and these products contain none.

India offers a cleaner example of closing this exact loophole: its 2019 law banning e-cigarettes and heated tobacco products prohibits their advertisement outright too, direct or indirect, regardless of whether the product contains tobacco leaf. The same identity-driven marketing playbook already got a version of it banned in Germany, as the “Be Marlboro” history above shows. Pakistan’s law simply hasn’t caught up to draw the same line for nicotine pouches yet.

At the international level, Article 13 of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC) calls for comprehensive restrictions on tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship, with implementation guidelines first adopted in 2008. In 2018, the Conference of the Parties (COP8) adopted its first decision on novel and emerging tobacco products and set up a working group to update Article 13 guidance for the digital era; that work produced new supplementary guidelines, adopted at COP10 in February 2024, extending TAPS protections to social media and to newer product categories such as heated tobacco and e-cigarettes. Nicotine pouches are still in a  greyr zone  as they don’t contain  tobacco leaf,  which is exactly why the WHO issued a standalone report in 2026 calling specifically for advertising bans, flavour restrictions, and stronger age controls on nicotine pouches. Pakistan  needs to extend the restrictions it already applies to cigarettes under its own law to nicotine pouches too, so that a product containing addictive nicotine can’t be marketed through lifestyle branding aimed at people too young to buy it legally.

The tactics are not new, only the wrapper

 A study of Pakistani adolescents found that Velo’s appeal came from its packaging, its discreet use, its visibility at the shop counter, and its circulation on social media. Unlike cigarettes, nicotine pouches are not currently subject to Pakistan’s pictorial health warning requirements. Instead, products generally display only a brief addiction statement, despite containing nicotine and being marketed in youth-appealing flavours. Even that statement is easy to miss: the pack itself does concede, in small print, that the product is highly addictive, but in a fraction of the type size and none of the graphic detail Pakistani law already requires on a cigarette pack.

Separately, researchers who chemically analysed ten Velo variants sold in Karachi found a wide, deliberately engineered spread of fruit, mint, and menthol flavour chemicals across the range, the kind of variation a manufacturer builds specifically to give every kind of user, including a first-time one, a flavour they’ll like. None of this is incidental. It is product design built for reach, the same design logic that turns a trusted face into a marketing surface.

Why celebrities, and why that choice isn’t neutral

Advertisement  to portray nicotine pouches as a fashionable, modern lifestyle choice, and the messaging risks creating a misleading impression that a highly addictive product is harmless.Celebrities are engaged for these campaigns precisely because their name carries an implicit endorsement no  ad company could buy on its own: an audience that trusts a public figure extends some of that trust to whatever they’re holding. That is exactly why appearing in one of these campaigns is not a neutral professional choice. In the absence of the health warning the product itself isn’t required to carry, the celebrity’s face becomes the primary safety signal young viewers get. The more ethical use of that same reach would run the other way: using a public platform to tell a young audience what these products actually contain and what health harm they can do, rather than making them look aspirational.

What the pouch actually does to a body

None of this would matter if the product were what its advertising implies. It isn’t. Nicotine absorbed through the mouth triggers a measurable rise in blood pressure and heart rate, and sustained use is linked to mucosal damage in the mouth alongside a longer-term strain on the cardiovascular system that raises the risk of hypertension, heart disease, and stroke. That risk lands hardest on the young, whose cardiovascular and nervous systems are still developing and who researchers have specifically flagged as more susceptible to nicotine’s effects on both the heart and the brain. A “smoke-free” can is still a nicotine-dependence machine. It has simply been designed to not look or feel like one.

What happens next is a choice, not a forecast

Pakistan cannot claim it doesn’t know what is happening. It has the sales data. It has the adolescent surveys. And it now has a second high-profile celebrity campaign in under a year, normalising a product that regulators still haven’t finished deciding how to classify.

What Pakistan still doesn’t have is a regulatory framework that treats nicotine pouches the way it already treats cigarettes. There is no minimum age requirement reliably enforced at the point of sale. There is no restriction on how these products can be advertised, on social media or anywhere else. And there is no requirement for the large, graphic health warnings that cigarette packs are already legally required to carry.

None of this requires new science or a new argument, only the will to apply rules that already exist for one nicotine product to another. TAPS restrictions written for cigarettes can be extended to cover nicotine pouches and other novel products before the next campaign ships, not after. Social media platforms operating in Pakistan can be held to the same advertising standards as broadcast media, instead of functioning as the industry’s open back door. And the celebrities being approached for the next brief carry a responsibility that goes beyond checking who’s watching: putting their name behind a product means being answerable for what it does to the people who trust them, especially the youngest ones.

The market found its next generation of customers first. Whether Pakistan lets it keep them now depends on three decisions that are still open: whether policymakers finally close the regulatory gap, whether celebrities and influencers choose not to lend their names to a product they wouldn’t want a younger relative using, and whether young people themselves learn to recognise a fashion pitch for what it actually is, a nicotine delivery product engineered to keep them buying, not a lifestyle statement.

Sources

Coalition for Tobacco Control Pakistan (CTC-Pak), reported in Daily Parliament Times, “Nicotine Pouch Campaign Sparks Public Health Concerns In Pakistan,” March 9, 2026

Alternative Research Initiative (ARI) Pakistan, “Health Ministry says Velo nicotine pouches non-tobacco products, not under its regulatory mandate,” National Assembly question-hour reply

TobaccoIntelligence, “Pakistan: nicotine pouch regulation,” April 2026

Institute for Global Tobacco Control, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Portland State University — chemical analysis of Velo flavour variants, Karachi, published in Tobacco Control

Pubmed — qualitative study on adolescent perceptions of nicotine pouches (Velo) in Pakistan, 2023-2024 focus groups

Pubmed — availability and marketing of nicotine pouches at points-of-sale in Pakistan, Nicotine & Tobacco Research, 2026

World Health Organization report on nicotine pouches, reported in Arab News, “‘Engineered for addiction’: WHO slams soaring nicotine pouch sales in Pakistan, elsewhere,” May 2026

WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control — Article 13 guidelines on tobacco/nicotine advertising, promotion and sponsorship (adopted 2008); Conference of the Parties decision FCTC/COP8(22) on novel and emerging tobacco products (2018); new supplementary Article 13 guidelines on digital media and new product categories, adopted at COP10 (February 2024)

Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids / Tobacco Tactics, University of Bath — “Be Marlboro” campaign reporting, including the October 2013 German court ban

India’s Prohibition of Electronic Cigarettes Act, 2019 (PECA), via Tobacco Control Laws

Frontiers in Public Health — cardiovascular risk review of nicotine pouches in youth, 2025

Reporting on Pakistan’s draft mandatory standards (PS: 5468) for nicotine pouch labelling and child safety warnings, 2025-2026