ee Advertising Ethics: Emerging Methods and Trends George M. Zinkhan What is Ethics? What ia Advertising? The contemporary philosopher, William Frankena (1973), has defined cthies as a set of moral principles directed at enhancing societal well-being. Frankena reduces those moral principles to two: beneficence (doing good) and justice (being fair). Another contemporary philosopher, Geoffrey Warnock (1971), lists four principles which seem to be particularly appropriate for advertising: beneficence, nonmaleficence (don't harm), nondeception, and nondiscrimination. At times, questions have arisen as to whether such principles are followed and whether societal well-being is, indeed, enhanced by the actions of advertisers. —— George M. Zinkhan is the Coca- ‘Advertisers and their agencies are required to make many difficult moral GierGharotMuratie ted choices, and i isnot always easy to know how to make these decision Deparment Head atthe University, Whatever choices advertisers make, there is no scarcity of third part (ore, public interest groups, the Federal Trade Commission, competitor, media commentators) to criticize and/or second guess. Thus, research on tulvertising ethics has the potential to assist managers and public poliey makers as they make very difficult choices about communicating with their respective publics, ‘Ono approach for understanding advertising ethics isto identify advertis- ing practices (eg, subliminal advertising, advertising to children) which have potentially harmful effects for society (or potentially harmful effects foraome segment of society). Actions which involve harmfal effects certainly presenta difficult set of moral choices and options. ‘Using an iterative approach, Hyman, Tansey, and Clark (in the lead article of this issue) identify 33 “prime topics” which are of particular con- ‘Sim to researchers who wish to explore advertising ethics. Based upon a survey of 124 JA reviewers and American Academy of Advertising mem- tors Hyman et el. report that the seven most important topics for the future study of advertising ethics are: 1) use of deception in ads, 2) advertis- Jag to children, 3) tobacco advertising, 4) alcoholic beverage ads, 5) negative pultical advertising, 6) racial stereotyping, and 7) sexual stereotyping. "The study of advertising othice is closely linked to other areas of advertia- ing research, For example, when studying the effects of advertising on Children, iis important to consider extant model of consumer behavior and Tearning, As discussed by Zinkhan and Johnson (1994), legal studies are ‘losely Hed to the study of advertising ethics. Legal systems are designed, {in part, to resolve disputes and enforce certain standards of morality (e.., ont harm others asin “thou shalt not Kill), Over time, a wide variety of fules and laws have been enacted to regulate advertising activity. The Federal Trade Commission is a major regulatory body in the U.S. which ‘xamines issues of fairness in advertising, Not surprisingly, the activities of the Federal Trade Commission have been the subject of a number of schol- arly articles in marketing and advertising. Some of these articles may cross the boundary and be classified as “legal research” rather than research on ttdvertning ethics. Nonetheless, at this point, itis very difficult to disen- Journal of Advertsing, tangle these related literatures. : Volume XXII, Number 3 Ts it possible to study advertising ethics without considering the legal September 1984 implications and ramifications? Is it possible to study the effects of advertis- Dee Conwicht © 2001. All Richta Reserved.2 Journal of Advertising —H SS __ oui of Advertising ing on children in isolation from the extant literature on psychology and information processing? The an. swer to both of these questions illustrates how the study of advertising ethics is inextricably linked to the scholarly inquiry which transpires in related fields. In brief, it ia not possible to answer the original ques- tion (‘what is advertising ethics?") without first an- ‘swering the perennial question, “what is advertis- ing?” Ethics Articles in the Journal of Advertising Advertising Ethics has been an important subject area for Journal of Advertising authors since the founding of the journal in the early 1970s, Under Daniel Stewart (JA editor from 1972 to 1975), there were 14 articles published on “Legal and Societal Issues” (including 7 on public policy and 4 on the Federal Trade Commission). Also under Stewart's editorship, there were 2 articles published on children’s advertising and 2 more published on the topics of comparative and corrective advertising. Taken together, these 18 “ethics” articles represented. 18.8 % of the total number of articles published under Stewart's tenure. This compares favorably with the 9 articles (9.4 %) published on international advertis- ing (the topic of the March 1994 JA special issue) and the 19 (19.8%) articles published in the area of con- sumer behavior. Inmore recent times, advertising ethies has contin- ued to attract considerable attention from JA au- thors. During the first 20 years of JA publication, there were 159 articles published on topics related to, advertising ethics (as defined by Hyman et al, in this, issue). These ethics articles represented 33,6 % of all the JA articles published during the first 20 years (sce Muney 1991). Again, this compares quite favorably with research on other topic areas, as 29.4 % of the articles during this 20-year period were concerned with consumer behavior and 26.9% were concerned with advertising messages. Thus, ethics has never been a neglected topic in advertising research. Given that this is s0, Hyman et al, rightfully ask, “is advertising ethies an exhausted topic?" Their conclusion is that the study of ethics is, not exhausted, There is still much left to learn. Con. sider, for example, the issue of tobacco advertising, which generates newspaper headlines almost daily. Also, consider the fact that the topie of political ad- vertising attracted no research attention at all dur- ing the tenure of the first JA editor, yet 7 articles on this topic (4.8%) were published under the editorship of Tony McGann (1983-1987). In brief, advertising ethics (like the subject of advertising itself) ia an evolving subject area. As new types of advertising ‘emerge (e.g., television commercials which are all but indistinguishable from television programs), new guidelines and laws are proposed. Advertising schol- ars respond to the changing marketplace by address. ing new topics with the latest technology and re- search method. In fact, it is encouraging that advertising ethics has evolved to such a point that it is now possible to study the existing literature itself (as Hyman et al. do in an exhaustive way and Martin does in a limited way in the present issue). One definition of humankind pos- its that humans are animals who study themselves. From this perspective, the advertising ethics litera. ‘ture now qualifies as human. It is an evolving crea- ture which, under certain circumstances, is compelled to study itself. Methods Used in Ethics Research The 7 articles in this special issue employ a wide variety of research methods. Among the methods em- ployed are: mall intercept interviews, experiments, surveys of consumers, surveys of experts, searching a computer data base, and philosophical argument. ‘Two groups of authors (Latour & Henthorne and Tinkham and Weaver-Lariscy) expose subjects to ads in an experimental setting. Both choose to employ pre-existing ads as their experimental stimuli. As experiments are a main pillar of social science re- search, the advantages and disadvantages of using experimental methods in advertising research are well known. ‘Treise et al. use a mall intercept method (as do Latour & Henthorne) to survey consumers about their attitudes toward specific advertising practices (e.g., advertising to minorities). Here, respondents are not. shown specific advertising stimuli but instead are asked to give their opinions about advertising prac- tices in general. As discussed above, Hyman et al. survey a group of advertising scholars in order to identify important topies for future research on ethics. In addition, Hyman et al. examine a data base of social science articles (je., the ABI/Inform database), in part to determine if advertising ethics is now a “mainstream topic.” They find that ethics is indeed a mature topic, as the authors identify 41 articles which contained Sh CRITE 2001: All Richie _September 1994 both “advertising” and “ethics” as keywords in the database. The following section contains some cau- tions about using computer searches to explore exist ing data bases of published articles. ‘There are some parallels between the methods used by Hyman et al. and by Martin. Both choose to survey advertising experta (i.e., professors with expertise in advertising) to draw conclusions. Martin employs this ‘expert opinion to evaluate 3 articles which were pub- lished previously by the Journal of the American Medi- cal Association. In the process, Martin also develops ‘a set of research standards which may apply to a wide variety of social science journals. It has been uite a while since the American Academy of Adver- tising (or JA) has explicitly considered the research standards which are appropriate for examining and evaluating scholarly work. Perhaps the Martin ar- ticle will stimulate more thought in this specialized area of “ethics.” It may also be appropriate to specu- late whether or not academic research requires a set of research standards which are somehow different than the ethical standards applied to practitioner or industry research. Or, perhaps the same set of stan- dards can be applied to both groups. ‘Two articles in this issue (Gould and Bush & Bush) are purely philosophical or conceptual. This is impor- tant, because we need strong theories to guide re- ‘search in advertising ethics. Theories are important, both for what they explain and for the research ques: tions and avenues which they suggest. 'As discussed above, the majority of methods used in this special issue are well known to advertising researchers. For example, we are well aware that there are benefits and liabilities associated with mall intercept interviews and interviews conducted with student subjects. However, the search of computer data bases is a relatively new method in the advertis- ing literature. Thus, the following section contains some brief illustrations of strengths and weaknesses associated with this approach. ‘Studying Ourselves: Some Cautions about Computer Databases ‘There are many advantages associated with com- puter searches of data bases; and, as mentioned pre- viously, it is quite encouraging that the literature on advertising ethics has advanced to such a point that: it is now possible to study the literature itself in abstracted form. As with any research method, there are limitations asaociated with such a computer search. For example, consider Hyman et al.'s important research question: “Is advertising ethics a mainstream topic?” Hyman et al. (using the ABI/Inform data base from 1987 through 1993) estimate that 41 out of 122) advertising articles have explored ethical issues. Other estimates are possible. For example, Muncy (1991) published an annotated index of the first twenty vol- ‘umes of JA (which contained a total of 478 articles). He identifies only 5 articles under the topic area of “Bthical Issues” (p. 3). However, if one adopts a broader definition of advertising ethics (e.g., the 33 topic ar- eas investigated by Hyman et al. in their Table 5), then there are 159 articles published on ad ethics over the 20-year time period. ‘Thus, we have 3 different estimates for the preva- lence of articles on advertising ethics. Hyman et al. estimate that 3.3 % of all advertising articles are concerned with ethics. A very limited interpretation of JA’s 20-year index results in an estimate of 1.1%, while a broader interpretation results in an estimate of 33.6%. A “true” figure is obviously somewhere in between these estimates. Nonetheless, a search of computer data bases or indexes is not strictly an ob- jective task, and there are many potential pitfall ‘To expand upon this issue of computer data bases, consider the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI), which is frequently used to make inferences about trends and patterns in scholarly research (cf. Cote, Leong, and Cote 1991; Zinkhan, Roth, and Saxton 1992). A search of this data base reveals that, in the late 1980s, a variety of marine biology journals began to cite articles from the Journal of Marketing Re- search (JMR) in some numbers. For example, the SSCI shows that a group of marine biology journals were citing JMR at least 15 times per year in the late 1980s. What is the explanation for this citation pattern? Perhaps a class of quantitative models have been created by JMR authors, and these have found their way into biology. If 20, this would be quite a contribu- tion to knowledge by marketing researchers. If one leaves the computer data base and looks up the actual articles, it is true that the biology journals are making citations to a J. of Mar. Res. (using the citation conventions of those journals). However, it turns out that the biological scholars had in mind the Journal of Marine Research, not the Journal of Mar- heting Research, ‘Such oddities are not all that uncommon in the SSCI, which consists of ten or so volumes each year and contains thousands and thousands of entries. SCI is indeed a useful resource. Nonetheless, this a ——————— Conwicht © 2001. All Richta Reserved.