How do Tobacco companies continue to increase their sales after advertising was banned?

In Indonesia, marketing for Tobacco is strict but still very very lenient. They cannot run commercials before 10pm, must not depict any people smoking and mostly carry a theme or quote. Recently government changed the warning signbox from " Smoking may cause death, cancer etc " into "Smoking kills". However since the new signbox embeds a picture of a man smoking and 3 skeletons, this change even promotes smoking inadvertently (talking about subliminal message). Tobacco industry in Indonesia heavily spent their promotional budget on music, arts and sport events. Yes you are reading it right, sports events such as soccer and badminton tournaments. From there they can attract more smokers, even the young one.

You could ask the same question about illegal drugs. You can't sell illegal drugs openly but yet, plenty of people seem to be able to find them. The fact is that there are limits on tobacco advertising but its not absolute. They can have displays in some areas etc and they make use of it. The last point, its an addictive product. People do not start out thinking that they want to become addicted, it just happens. They seek it out because its "forbidden" and then they take it from there. If all tobacco sales were banned things might be different Its not addictive enough to thrive as an illegal commodity. Tobacco marketing is now more stealthy than ever before. The fact is that a smoker can be worth quite a bit to a tobacco company over a lifetime. Smokers do not change brands often and do not reduce consumption easily, but they will increase it easily. At the same time the product is pretty cheap to manufacture. Its one of the few items that the US still has a large export position in. Long story short, suppressing advertising, made it more cool to a group of people. The manufacturers have become more stealthy with their advertising and lastly, there is a lot of money at stake here so the government will also turn a blind eye.

Tobacco use is still heavily embedded in some cultures. Also, you can still see depictions of smoking in film, television and video games.

Speaking as a repented tobacco addict, perhaps I could shed some light on my psychology at the time. I had my first cigarette when I was a mere boy of 11. My uncle Paul was in town, and he and his wife smoked like a chimney. He was this glamorous businessman who founded a chain of Chinese eateries in a far off country called Germany, and at 11 I was star struck. He made the mistake of leaving a pack unattended, and I quickly jimmied one. I sneaked under my bed, lit up with a box of matches (took me a few tries), and took a long deep breath. It was the vilest, nastiest, meanest thing that I had ever tasted then, before, or since, and had me coughing up pieces of lung tissue for months on end. It was to be the last cigarette that I would touch for a decade. In my early twenties, I fell in with a bad crowd. We dyed our hair an unflattering shade of neon yellow, got ourselves some tattoos, profanity served as punctuation, and we strutted around like peacocks pretending to be hard. Smoking was the accepted social norm. If you didn't smoke, you didn't belong. I didn't like it much even then. It made my breath smell, I coughed incessantly, food became tasteless, my clothes stank, a decent girl who I had my eye on at the time stayed as far away from me as she possibly could. But still we bragged about how much we smoked. As if it was an achievement. We wanted to belong so badly. Therein lies the problem with smoking. Its virality. It was social when Zuckerberg was just a gleam in his father's eye. Advertising might serve to increase awareness of a particular brand of smokes, and increase market share for that brand, but the market will still exist anyway because of network effects. Banning advertising is in itself a relatively ineffective measure to curb smoking.

Advertising, especially tobacco advertising, has generally been misunderstood outside the industry. Tobacco advertising never changed much in terms of the total market for tobacco products; it didn't even change much in terms of how this market was split among various types of tobacco products. What it did change was how the market for a given type of product (e.g., cigarettes) was split among competing brands. In fact, the major players in the industry were delighted with the partial ban on advertising. They now get the same effects at less expense.

China and switching people to snooze.

By increasing the number of selling points and reaching into modern trade and modern retail channels.