Table of contents

No. 1. 2. 3. Topics Introduction Body Conclusions and references Pages 1 2-6 7-8

Introduction
Business ethics comprises principles and standards that guide behaviour in the world of business. Ethics also helps in advertising, it determine the life blood of the free enterprise system and stimulates competition. It provide information for comparison buying and provides competitive information to competition. It also provide social and economic benefits. In advertising consumers need an information that is clear, accurate and adequate.

Ethics of Advertising Nature of Advertising

A public notice meant to convey information and invite patronage or some other response. Inform and persuade ("stimulate demand"). From a marketing context, advertising could be defined as "a paid form of non-personal communication about an organization and/or its products that is transmitted to a target audience through a mass medium." Therefore one kind of promotional activity, separate from publicity , sales promotion (not forms of communication), and personal selling (not impersonal nor through a mass medium).

Morally neutral : neither in itself good nor bad. Reason: Advertising is a tool.

Main Objections to Advertising

Advertising is deceptivein whole or in part. Advertising weakens or undermines personal autonomy; that some kinds of advertising are immoral. Advertising plays on human desires for security, acceptance, self-esteem to influence consumer choices. John Kenneth Galbraiths: the Dependence Effectindustrial production turns out goods to satisfy wants, and at the same time creates the wants. Ex: mouthwash, anti-persperant, So production is no long justifiable, the market is no longer self-correcting, and human autonomy is undermined.

F.A. von Hayek: almost all wants beyond primitive needs for food, shelter, and sex are the result of cultural influences. Desires for art, music, and literature are created by painters, musicians and novelists. Non sequitur to hold that wants created by the forces that also satisfy them are less urgent or less important. Worth of a want cannot depend on its source, but on some other criterion.

Advertising should not cynically exploit deep-seated emotions or short-circuit logical thought processes. Good advertising appeals on many grounds, aesthetic, intellectual, humorous, heart-warming. But it shouldnt deprive of freedom of choice.

Advertising promotes consumption as way of life (Christopher Lasch); it empties communication of its content, destroys credence in the written or spoken word (Robert Heilbroner); it is (often) tasteless and irritating, and lowers culture in general

[Economic objection] Advertising is a waste of resources (adds nothing to the value of consumer products and diverts resources from the production of more valuable goods) and inefficient (enables large firms with well-established brand-name products to create and maintain monopoly conditions), largely a nonproductive activity that stifles competition. Which would mean that it actually harms the system in general.

advertising increases value of a product by creating buyers of the product, creates an expanding market, and actually has been shown to lower prices. And there is no guarantee that dollars saved on advertising could be utilized more efficiently, especially in a surplus economy

Ethical Principles especially relevant to Advertising General

Principles of the moral order must be applied to the domain of media Human freedom has a purpose: making an authentic moral response. All attempts to inform and persuade must respect the purposes of human freedom if they are to be moral.

Morally good advertising therefore is that advertising that seeks to move people to choose and act rationally in morally good ways; morally evil advertising seeks to move people to do evil deeds that are self-destructive and destructive of authentic community

Means and techniques of advertising must also be considered: manipulative, exploitative, corrupt and corrupting methods of persuasion and motivation

Three Specific Moral Principles

RESPECT TRUTHFULNESS (deception objection)

Never directly intend to deceive Never use simply untrue advertising Do not distort the truth by implying things that are not so or withholding relevant facts

"Puffery" is acceptable where it is consonant with recognized and accepted rhetorical and symbolic practice

RESPECT THE DIGNITY OF EACH HUMAN PERSON (attacks autonomy objection)

Do not exploit our "lower inclinations" to compromise our capacity to reflect or decide either through its content or through its impact: using appeals to lust, vanity, envy and greed, and other human weakness.

Give special care to the weak and vulnerable: children, young people, the elderly, the poor, and the culturally disadvantaged

RESPECT SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITIES (promotes consumption, empties communication, objections)

Example: Concern for the ecologyadvertising should not favor a lavish lifestyle which wastes resources and despoils the environment

Example: Advertising should not reduce human progress to acquiring material goods and cultivating a lavish lifestyle

Benefits of Advertising

Economic: useful tool for sustaining honest and ethically responsible competition by informing people of the availability of rationally desirable new products and services and improvements in existing ones

Political: helps counteract tendencies toward the monopolization of power by informing people of the ideas and policy proposals of parties and candidates

Cultural: can exert a positive influence on decisions about media content; contribute the betterment of society by uplifting and inspiring people and motivating them to act in ways that benefit themselves and others. Importance of witty, tasteful and entertaining advertising, even to the point of becoming art.1

Moral and Religious: communicate messages of faith, patriotism, tolerance, compassion and neighborly service, charity, health, education

Harms of Advertising

Economic: misrepresent and without relevant facts; subvert the media by pressure not to treat of questions that are embarrassing and inconvenient; tout harmful or useless goods; move people based on non-rational decisions; become a tool of "consumerism"; particularly harmful in economically less developed countries

Political: costs of advertising can limit political competition to wealthy candidates or to those willing to compromise their integrity; distorts the views and records of opponents

Cultural: corrupt culture and cultural values by contradicting sound traditional values; can create superficiality, tawdriness, and moral squalor; ignore educational and social needs of certain segments of the audience; contributes to stereotyping of particular groups

Moral and religious harms: deliberate appeals to motives of envy, status seeking, and lust creates vulgar and morally degrading advertising; treat of religion in obnoxious and offensive manners; can promote morally suspect or perverse products and practices

1. This is an interesting point. Art is good, as are tasty, witty, entertaining things, as opposed to tawdry, superficial things, full of moral squalor. But can we believe an advertiser has a moral duty to provide such things?? I think so: by this argument. 1. We all have the moral duty to do good when reasonable and to avoid

evil when possible. 2. Advertisements (and media in general) that are tasty, witty,

entertaining does good for our culture, making it more pleasant and humane, while tawdriness, superficiality, and moral squalor harms the culture. 3. Advertising has a great effect on our culture in general, making this

moral duty is all the more serious. Therefore, advertisers have a moral duty to create tasty, witty, entertaining advertisements when this is reasonable, and to avoid tawdry, superficial and morally squalid advertising when that can be avoided. The burden of proof would be upon the advertisers to show why in any particular case the demand to make advertising tasty, witty, and entertaining was an unreasonable demand, or why tawdry and superficial advertisings couldn't have been avoided.

CONCLUSIONS Corporate culture shapes the ethical understandings and practices of these agencies. A key ethical question is the fundamental purpose of advertising itself. How this purpose is defined, in turn, shapes the grounds of moral authority of the advertising professional. Agency A's corporate culture espouses a more "conventional" philosophy, which views the agency's relationship with is clients as fiduciary. As such, its role is to advance the clients' interests by creating advertising that sells their products as effectively as possible, thus maintaining longterm client relationships. The relationship is "morally neutral" in that it makes minimal judgments about the "moral goodness" of the products, assuming that such judgments about social benefit and harm are made primarily through external mechanisms (consumers, government). In effect, the moral authority of the advertising professional is attributed to, and to some extent surrendered to, external sources. Agency B's corporate culture is strongly shaped by its CEO, who attempts to translate his personal moral convictions into the agency's philosophy of advertising. That vision is more morally laden. Agency B attempts not only to serve the client well but also to do so in ways that advance a particular vision of the good society. This latter philosophy is more prone to make moral judgments about the goodness or badness of products and also about the values that are communicated in the advertising of the product. Predictably, the moral ambiguity that surrounds advertising's social purpose also results in some expressions of ambiguity about individual professional identity. Some members of both agencies expressed ambivalence and uncertainty about their own contribution to society, questioning advertising's varied impacts, value, and benefit to society. Others, however, spoke with great professional pride of its contribution to the economy by facilitating the buying and selling and goods as well as its capacity to promote artistic creativity in the service of client. Almost all attested to their own personal growth and development within their agencies.

References
http://www.scribd.com/doc/ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics google.com/Advertisements