About

Why Canary?

The internet offers new avenues for tobacco, alcohol and other dangerous products to be promoted directly to consumers—including children—with less oversight than traditional media channels. This unprecendented access has posed a significant challenge to curbing advertising for addictive products.

Canary by Vital Strategies is a digital media monitoring service that collects examples of tobacco marketing on social media and news sites. Canary analyzes marketing activity, uncovers insidious campaigns and provides stakeholders with dashboards of powerful, actionable data.

As a result of Canary’s reporting, millions of children are being protected from viewing advertisements for addictive substances.



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Methodology

Leading public health experts harness the efficiency of AI to offer scalable monitoring of harmful digital marketing content.

  1. Canary continuously scans tens of thousands of news articles and social media posts and flags potentially harmful content.
  2. Our researchers review and validate the findings to identify problematic content and emerging trends.
  3. We compile our insights and share them with public health advocates, policy makers, NGOs, tech partners, and other stakeholders to support timely, evidence-based action.

Canary History

Canary began in India in 2019 as a Facebook page that crowdsourced user-submitted instances of tobacco marketing. As an extension to the Facebook campaign, Vital Strategies launched Canary to scale capacity and reach. After receiving enthusiastic support, Canary expanded into Indonesia and Mexico, protecting millions from harmful tobacco advertising. Beginning in 2024, we also began working with partners in Brazil and China.

The Canary model was designed to scale quickly and be applied across sectors, such as ultra-processed foods and sugary drinks. In 2025, Canary will begin reporting on online alcohol marketing in partnership with RESET Alcohol, adding South Africa and the Philippines to our focus countries.

Canary is a project of Vital Strategies, a leading global public health organization. To learn more about our work, please visit the Vital Strategies website.

Canary by Vital Strategies is a first-of-its-kind service that monitors and reports cases of online addictive product marketing to support the introduction, strengthening and enforcement of public health policies.

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