Background:
Tobacco companies advertising and promotions affect behavior related to smoking. In line with WHO-FCTC's Article 13, Brazil has banned direct advertising, promotion and sponsorship in all type of media since 2000. This study aimed to analyze and describe the characteristics of indirect tobacco advertising in Brazilian TV programs.

Methods:
Descriptive study, content analysis of 345 hours of programming in 2014, including novels, Brazilian series, reality shows and films with the highest audience for the population with medium and low income in free-to-air channels in Brazil. With an adaptation of the Breath California´s "Thumbs Up Thumbs Down" method of Sacrament Emigrants Trails, tobacco appearances were encoded in which an incident is any on-screen product appearance (actual use, implicit use, verbal or gestural message, or atmosphere of smoke). Each program was viewed by two reviewers independently. Data were processed and analyzed using CSPro and Stata12 programs.

Results:
Out of the 470 analyzed programs (345hs), 35% presented incidents / messages related to tobacco (3hs). Out of the programs that portrayed tobacco, use, Reality Shows represented the majority (44,5%), followed by films (21,3%) and novels and series (17,1% each). 63% of the programs were considered suitable for 12 year olds, 16% for 14 year olds, 15% for 10 year olds, 6% for 16 year olds and above and 27% presented 21 or more incidents. 609 tobacco-related scenes were identified, 76.7% of which were cigarettes, apparitions of cigars (15%), pipe (4.5%) and narguile (3.8%) were also observed. 95.6% of the scenes contained pro-tobacco messages.

Conclusions:
This research made it possible to measure the frequency of "indirect advertising" in large audience programs aimed at the lower classes of the Brazilian population, which is one of the tobacco marketing alternatives, even with the prohibition of tobacco advertising throughout the National territory.