Advertising claims to enhance our choice, but it offers us little choice about whether we see

and hear it, and ever less choice about whether we respond to it. Since Edward Bernays began
to apply the findings of his uncle Sigmund Freud, advertisers have been developing
sophisticated means of overcoming our defences. In public they insist that if we become
informed consumers and school our children in media literacy we have nothing to fear from
their attempts at persuasion. In private they employ neurobiologists to find ingenious
methods of bypassing the conscious mind.

Pervasiveness and repetition act like a battering ram against our minds. The first time we see
an advertisement, we are likely to be aware of what it's telling us and what it is encouraging
us to buy. From then on, we process it passively, absorbing its imagery and messages without
contesting them, as we are no longer fully switched on. Brands and memes then become
linked in ways our conscious minds fail to detect. As a report by the progressive thinktank
Compass explains, the messages used by advertisers are designed to trigger emotional rather
than rational responses. The low-attention processing model developed by Robert Heath at
the University of Bath shows how, in a crowded advertising market, passive and implicit
learning become the key drivers of emotional attachment. They are particularly powerful
among children, as the prefrontal cortex – which helps us to interpret and analyse what we
see – is not yet fully developed.

Advertising agencies build on this knowledge to minimise opportunities for the rational mind
to intervene in choice. The research company TwoMinds, which has worked for Betfair, the
drinks company Diageo, Mars, Nationwide and Waitrose, works to "uncover a layer of
behavioural drivers that have previously remained elusive". New developments in
neurobiology have allowed it to home in on "intuitive judgments" that "are made
instantaneously and with little or no apparent conscious effort on the part of consumers – at
point of purchase".

The power and pervasiveness of advertising helps to explain, I believe, the remarkable figure
I stumbled across last week while reading the latest government spreadsheet on household
spending. Households in the UK put an average of just £5.70 a week, or £296 a year, into
savings and investments. Academic research suggests a link between advertising and both
consumer debt and the number of hours we work. People who watch a lot of advertisements
appear to save less, spend more and use more of their time working to meet their rising
material aspirations.

All three outcomes can have terrible impacts on family life. They also change the character of
the nation. Burdened by debt, without savings, we are less free, less resilient, less able to
stand up to those who bully us.

Invention is the mother of necessity. To keep their markets growing, companies must keep
persuading us that we have unmet needs. In other words, they must encourage us to become
dissatisfied with what we have. To be sexy, beautiful, happy, relaxed, we must buy their
products. They shove us on to the hedonic treadmill, on which we must run ever faster to
escape a growing sense of inadequacy.

The problem this causes was identified almost 300 years ago. In Robinson Crusoe, published
in 1719, the hero remarks: "It put me to reflecting, how little repining there would be among
mankind, at any condition of life, if people would rather compare their condition with those
that are worse, in order to be thankful, than be always comparing them with those which are
better, to assist their murmurings and complainings."

Advertising encourages us to compare ourselves with those we perceive to be better off. It

persuades us to trash our happiness and trash the biosphere to answer a craving it exists to
perpetuate.

But perhaps the most important impact explored by Think of Me As Evil? is the one we
discuss the least: the effect it has on our values. Our social identity is shaped by values which
psychologists label as either extrinsic or intrinsic. People with a strong set of intrinsic values
place most weight on their relationships with family, friends and community. They have a
sense of self-acceptance and a concern for other people and the environment. People with
largely extrinsic values are driven by a desire for status, wealth and power over others. They
tend to be image-conscious, to have a strong desire to conform to social norms and to possess
less concern for other people or the planet. They are also more likely to suffer from anxiety
and depression and to report low levels of satisfaction with their lives.

We are not born with our values: they are embedded and normalised by the messages we
receive from our social environment. Most advertising appeals to and reinforces extrinsic
values. It doesn't matter what the product is: by celebrating image, beauty, wealth, power and
status, it helps create an environment that shifts our value system. Some adverts appear to
promote intrinsic values, associating their products with family life and strong communities.
But they also create the impression that these values can be purchased, which demeans and
undermines them. Even love is commingled with material aspiration, and those worthy of this
love mostly conform to a narrow conception of beauty, lending greater weight to the
importance of image.

I detest this poison, but I also recognise that I am becoming more dependent on it. As sales of
print editions decline, newspapers lean even more heavily on advertising. Nor is the problem
confined to the commercial media. Even those who write only for their own websites rely on
search engines, platforms and programs ultimately funded by advertising. We're hooked on a
drug that is destroying society. As with all addictions, the first step is to admit to it.

twitter.com/georgemonbiot

• A fully referenced version of this article can be found at www.monbiot.com

Advertising itself is not evil, but it has
certainly got out of control
Advertising bolsters the UK's economy, but makes its inhabitants poorer, less happy and less
kind. It's time to halt the spread

• Ed Gillespie: advertising in itself is not evil, it's just a communication

• George Monbiot: advertising is a poison that demeans even love - and we're hooked on it

 Share 44

 inShare13

 Email

 Jon Alexander for the Guardian Professional Network

 guardian.co.uk, Friday 25 November 2011 14.43 GMT

 Jump to comments (14)

This year's John Lewis ad makes a surface appeal to intrinsic motivations, but is it actually any better
for society? Photograph: PR company handout

As one of the authors of the recent Think of me as evil? report on the impact of advertising
on social and cultural values, I've been frustrated in the past few weeks by the way we've got
stuck on the question of whether advertising is evil, rather than getting into the deeper
questions. Admittedly, I made my own bed to some extent, but let's see if we can go beyond
the headline.
So should we think of advertising as evil? No, despite the provocative name of our report, we
shouldn't – but I would propose that it is certainly out of control, and the resultant impact on
social and cultural values is doing our society and our economy a great disservice.

I want to start by setting out the context for advertising, and looking back to where we have
come from. Then I'll offer a thought on how that context is changing, and what that means for
advertising's role in society. Finally, I'll offer a suggestion or two for what we should do from
here.

So, where are we coming from? What is the deal between advertising and society as it stands
today?

The history of advertising

My first boss in advertising, noting both my geeky and my idealistic streaks early, sought to
answer this for me with a book.

The book was The End of History, by Francis Fukuyama. For those not familiar with it, the
hypothesis is that in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the contest between social
systemsended. All that remained was to spread the word of a particularly fundamentalist
strain of capitalism across the globe. Growth was good, and that meant more people buying
more stuff more often. Advertising, then, which sought to sell more stuff to more people more
often, was very much a "good thing". It's a sweeping description, but broadly speaking, that's
still the story we live by today, with our key measures of Consumer Confidence, with school
competitions identifying the Young Consumer of the Year, and so on.

As a result, advertising has an access-all-areas pass in our lives, a pass of which the industry
is taking full advantage. Organisations such as the Advertising Association exist to promote
and protect "advertising freedoms", and the big game is to push advertising ever further –
from naming football stadiums to product placement on television, to schools, buildings
exteriors and beyond. There are media companies that will carve your brands into trees and
claim they are environmentally friendly for doing so. As Linda Kaplan Thaler, CEO of
Kaplan Thaler Group in the US, says: "Ubiquity is the new exclusivity".

A new shift

However, something is changing. As economist and commentator Will Hutton put it a couple
of weeks ago at the launch of a report on the contribution of advertising to the UK economy,
we can't count economic contributions "with one eye closed".

We are starting to understand that measuring the success of a nation by GDP is like
measuring the success of a company by turnover alone. We are on the brink of developing
true cost-benefit – or profit and loss — analyses of nations and of major industries. And when
that happens, the advertising industry needs to be very careful, or else, to quote Hutton again,
it will find itself in the dock.

Why is this? Well, you'll have to read our report for a full answer, but the hypothesis we pose
is rooted in the study of cultural values. This field of social psychology poses a model of
human behaviour that says we are by nature at least as co-operative as we are competitive, as
least as selfless as narrowly self-interested, and at least as driven by the desire for fulfilment
and purpose as we are by the desire for status and success relative to our peers. In short, it
poses that we are by nature at least as intrinsically (on our own terms) as extrinsically
(relative to others) motivated in our lives.

Note the phrase "by nature". Because when you introduce advertising into the mix, especially
in its current ubiquity, the scales tip. A wide range of studies, which we review in more detail
in our report, provide statistical evidence that higher levels of advertising lead to people
working longer hours, saving less, and borrowing and buying more. Advertising in aggregate
serves to normalise and validate the pursuit of status, of financial success, of sexual prowess,
of self-interest as individual and societal goals, at the expense of fulfilment of purpose, of
selflessness, and so on.

The consequences

The impact of this is terrifying purely on economic grounds, with personal debt in the UK
already over £1.5tn. That's nearly double the current national debt, and it's predicted to rise
50% by 2015. If advertising is adding to this debt burden then it is doing a great disservice to
our economy. But the wider impacts are even more concerning.

When extrinsic motivations dominate, our likelihood to care about the problems of others
diminishes – whether those others are people, animals, or the world as a whole. Where
extrinsic motivations are prevalent, social equity is less, and negative environmental impact is
greater.

And the impacts are not just on others. Individuals for whom extrinsic motivations are
prevalent tend to be less happy, and are at significantly greater risk of mental illness – again
unsurprising, given some of those numbers for personal debt, and again related to
considerable costs to the UK economy.

It's these findings that have led Oxfam, WWF, Action for Children, PIRC and many other
leading NGOs to come together in the Common Cause project, which you can find out more
about at valuesandframes.org. And it's these findings that mean we have to look very hard at
advertising.

And the question we have to ask now is this: for all the benefits that advertising brings, what
are the costs, in the undermining of informal support networks, of ecosystem services and of
personal mental and physical wellbeing? Is advertising – in its present form, and at its present
level of ubiquity – contributing to economic growth, or to what former World Bank
economist Herman Daly calls "uneconomic growth", where the marginal costs of an increase
in GDP exceed the marginal benefits? The evidence strongly suggests the latter.

What should we do?

The most important thing we can do is to stop advertising creeping further into our lives. As I
have been careful to say, it is not necessarily that advertising is evil, but that, in its current
state of ubiquity, its impact on our values is. Advertising is neither evil nor useless; but it is
out of control. We must create space for our intrinsic motivations to be expressed and
validated. We need to nurture and celebrate what's great about culture: not strive to strengthen
our already dominant role as consumers. And for that to happen, advertising has to give us
some room to breathe.

This requires quantitative action, removing advertising from certain parts of our lives.
Qualitative shifts, such as encouraging advertisers to endorse intrinsic values instead of
extrinsic, are not the solution. Although campaigns such as John Lewis' current Christmas
effort are arguably more focused on the intrinsic than the extrinsic, they're still associating the
fulfilment of those motivations with the act of consumption; and while the little boy brought
a tear to my eye as much as the next man, we need to be a little circumspect. There is no
evidence to suggest that advertising that makes a surface appeal to intrinsic motivations is
any better in the long run, and it may even undermine and trivialise the pursuit of intrinsic
motivations.

Once we have found a way to halt the spread, we then need to go deep into the cost-benefit
analysis and start to remove advertising from the places it should not be. At the point where
advertising revenue becomes an uneconomic way to fund our society, we'll need to find
alternatives. If the great rebranding exercise of recent decades was the renaming of debt as
credit, the next great task might well be to revisit the concept of tax in order to make it a
more popular alternative. This cost-benefit debate is the debate that needs to be had, and this
is where the research needs to be done.

The need to act now

But I and many others believe we already know enough to act in one area – by removing
advertising from childhood. We know children cannot form the implicit social contracts that
we adults do when we open a magazine and know advertising has subsidised its cover price.
We know from recent work by Unicef that materialism is a major factor in why UK
childhood wellbeing is the lowest in any OECD nation. We teach media literacy in schools in
a vain attempt to equip children with some defence, even though we know that such classes
operate at a conscious level while advertising operates at an subconscious level, so that the
net effect is rather like building a fence to stop a mole. A ban on advertising to children could
never be complete, but it would give us the chance to start our lives as something other than
consumers, and it would set a very important tone.

As a new society emerges, the advertising industry would do well to withdraw itself from the
arena of childhood, and to start understanding where else its borders should retract. It also
needs to embrace research into the social and economic costs it incurs. If it does not, it will
soon come to be seen as evil, whether it deserves it or not.
Ethics of Advertising
Nature of Advertising
 (#2) a public notice meant (a) to convey information and (b) invite patronage or some other
response. Inform and persuade ("stimulate demand"). From a marketing context, advertising
could be defined as "a paid form of nonpersonal 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 (free), 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 deceptive—in 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 Galbraith’s: the Dependence Effect—industrial
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.

o 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.

o 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 shouldn’t 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.

o 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

o Principles of the moral order must be applied to the domain of media

o 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.

o 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

o 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)

o Never directly intend to deceive

o Never use simply untrue advertising

o Do not distort the truth by implying things that are not so or withholding relevant
facts

o "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)

o 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.
 o 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)

o Example: Concern for the ecology—advertising should not favor a lavish lifestyle
which wastes resources and despoils the environment

o 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.

Ethics in Advertising

Note: The following speech was written by Chris Moore of Ogilvy & Mather to help liven up
what can be a bland topic. While it has been edited by the AEF and contains basic
information about topics we have found to be of interest to students, you will want to use
your own words and examples where possible.

I'm here to talk about ethics in advertising.

No, this isn't going to be "The shortest lecture ever given." People in advertising spend a lot
of their time dealing with ethical choices, and those choices are almost never black and white.
They're subtle, shades-of-gray choices, juicy enough for a Philosophy major.

Let's start with the truth. Telling the truth seems like a pretty basic ethical standard. The
world's best example of truth in advertising may be a tiny "Help Wanted" ad that appeared in
the London papers in 1900:
"Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete
darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success.
Ernest Shackleton."

Englishmen being what they are, the ad drew an overwhelming response. And Shackleton's
Polar expedition turned out to be far, far worse than his bleak copy promised - a rare case of
an advertisement over-delivering on its claims.

Now let's look at a more subtle shade of truth in this infamous Volvo commercial. In a real-
life monster truck show, the Volvo was the only car left uncrushed - a great idea for a
commercial! But to make the ad, the film company needed to shoot several takes. So they
reinforced the beams inside the car to stand repeated squashing. When this came out in the
press, Volvo was pilloried and their ad agency got fired, ultimately going out of business. Did
it serve them right? Or was it a bum rap? No question the demo was rigged. But what it
showed was the truth: if a monster truck runs over you once, you're safer in the Volvo.

An ethical brainteaser we deal with every day is: "What can you legitimately simulate to
illustrate the truth?" Before you answer "nothing!", ask yourself if a Higher Purpose would be
served if Pampers and Kotex commercials showed the real thing instead of that fake blue
water.

Ads for reputable companies almost never lie. They have to be able to prove what they say to
their own corporate counsel, the ad agency's lawyers, the network's approval committees and
to any number of regulating bodies like the FDA and the FTC. With at least five different
government agencies looking over our shoulder, the cost of being caught cheating is simply
too high. In addition, the individuals inside a company want to be able to look at themselves
in the mirror. Some like to think of business people as belonging to some other species, but
remember that most of them are you a few years from now.

So we tell the truth -- but not always the Whole Truth. Like lawyers, our job is to put our
clients in the best light. When you go on a job interview or a first date, you don't assume a
false identity - but you probably don't make a full disclosure either. Chances are you keep
your lactose intolerance and foot odor issues in the background, and save your Federation
Starfleet uniform for later in the relationship - if there IS a later.

For a company trying to sell something, an ad is like getting a job interview with millions of
people all at once. The ad wants to make a good first impression and really, really doesn't
want to make people mad. But different people react differently.

During the 2000 Super Bowl, millions of people saw the following commercial for
Christopher Reeve walking again.

Some of us saw an uplifting message of hope. Some saw a cynical company manipulating
people's hope to make a buck. Still others - many of them with disabilities - saw an ad that
gave false hope. What did you see?

It's an axiom in advertising that when you do something bold, it's likely to polarize your
audience. And big events like the Super Bowl or the Olympics make advertisers bolder.
You can tell the ad agency really enjoyed creating the horror movie spoof with an Olympic
runner. This Nike commercial ran during the 2000 Olympics. But this commercial received
over 2,000 complaints. Nike heard them and killed the spot and unlike Freddie Kruger, this
ad stayed dead!

A lot of people question the ethics of selling consumers things they don't need - which
presupposes that we shouldn't have the things we don't need but want anyway. We don't need
90% of the stuff in our apartments. We don't need artwork, among other things. Neanderthals
didn't need cave paintings, but they sure brighten up a grotto. Why did so many of us bring
bottled water - that we paid for - into this meeting room today, when carrying a canteen of tap
water is so much more… rational?

Advertising, like human beings, lives where Reason meets Desire. Years ago, The Coca-Cola
Company invented a better product. No consumer product had ever been so thoroughly tested
with so many consumers. This new Coke was provably much better. But consumers not only
didn't buy it, they demonstrated against it. Because a lot of what they loved about "real" Coke
wasn't inside the bottle. It was the idea of Coke and their experiences with it and how those
experiences were connected to so much of what we imagine life in America should be like.
Advertising isn't just about the things we buy. It's about how we feel about things, including
ourselves. That's what makes it interesting.

Cause-related marketing

Speaking of feelings, 80% of Americans say they feel better about companies that are aligned
with social issues. Two thirds of us say we'd be inclined to switch to a brand that we identify
with a good cause. It's why American Express put on the Tribeca Film Festival in lower
Manhattan to help bring people back to the area after September 11th. Wal-Mart focuses on
community efforts of their associates and stores. General Mills' "Spoonfuls of Hope"
campaign features Lance Armstrong promoting cancer research. Johnson & Johnson - always
at the top of polls as a socially responsible company -- has been running a campaign to help
promote nursing as a career:

Does the extra business and good will these companies stand to gain compromise the good
that the causes do? What are the ethics of enlightened self-interest? Not long ago a major
advertiser donated a quarter-million dollars in food aid to Bosnians in the wake of the war
there. By all accounts, the aid did a lot of good. Later, the company spent over a million
dollars to advertise their good deed to American audiences. What decision would you have
made?

Tobacco Advertising

Ronald Reagan once appeared in ads touting the health benefits of a cigarette brand. Times
have changed. Now the space in which tobacco can be promoted in any form is growing more
restricted every day. And tobacco isn't the only legal - and potentially lethal - product that
poses ethical, not to mention public policy questions for us.

Ad agencies and individual advertising people make their own decisions about categories like
tobacco and guns. Many say, "No, thanks" to working on certain businesses. But would you
turn down the Kraft Macaroni and Cheese assignment because another division of the same
corporation makes Marlboros? That's a tougher question.

Alcohol

There are hundreds of beer commercials on the air, but not one of them shows somebody
actually drinking the beer. Does that make them more ethical? And although there's the same
amount of the same chemical in a can of Bud and a shot of Jack Daniels, you don't see hard
liquor advertised on television. In the case of alcohol, advertisers themselves have made these
"ethical" choices. But do they make rational sense? The Mothers Against Drunk Driving
(MADD) probably don't make the same distinction between beer and bourbon that advertisers
do.

Incidentally, advertising people working for free because they believe in the cause create
MADD's ads. Ad folk like to work pro bono for nonprofits and good causes. Public service
campaigns, including anti-smoking messages, got over $1.5 billion dollars in free media last
year. Altogether, they'd be the fifth largest advertiser.

The ethical issue isn't the alcohol in the product, it's the brand name on the bottle (Smirnoff
Ice). When I say the word "Smirnoff", what do you think of? - you're not alone. A rival
company says this commercial is misleading you because there's no vodka in Smirnoff Ice.
It's a malt beverage. Does the name "Smirnoff" mean "vodka" or is it just a name? Many of
you are in the target audience. Are you being fooled here? And if you thought Smirnoff Ice
contained vodka, did you also think it contained ice? You don't have to take time from your
studies to decide this case. As we speak, it's being examined by the ATF (Federal Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms).

Condoms

I assume these are not unfamiliar to you. Should they be advertised? Most networks won't
accept condom ads because they might offend certain audiences. Even where condom ads are
okay, there are ethical choices to make about what kind of product demonstration is
appropriate. And in what context? One example of context is that people in condom ads
usually wear wedding rings. Because even though the biggest market probably lies outside
the Marital Bed, the truth about where all those condoms are really going raises some touchy
issues. If you were the Creative Director on the Trojans account, is that an ethical issue? Do
you show the real truth and take the consequences?

Children

Society imposes context on advertising ethics all the time - especially in advertising that
involves children. Here's a commercial for children's shampoo. On behalf of Society, can you
see what's wrong with this message?

The problem isn't something in the spot - it's what's missing. There is no adult supervision
shown around the swimming pool. The Children's Advertising Review Unit (CARU) of the
Better Business Bureau (BBB), which also monitors kid's programming, requires that adults
be shown supervising children when products or activities could be risky. So L'Oreal changed
the commercial to model good parental behavior. Score one for Society. Another commercial
for Aim toothpaste showed a child who went to the bathroom in a museum to brush her teeth.
Good hygiene or not, it had to be taken off the air when teachers complained that they'd
never, ever, let a child leave the group unattended.

Advertisers spend most of their waking hours trying to anticipate what their audiences will
want and how they'll react. We try our best, but sometimes we miss.

Pharmaceutical advertising

Information is ethically neutral. In an academic setting like this, we welcome more

information because the marketplace of ideas enables individuals to form their own
judgments - which brings us to advertising about prescription drugs. Not long ago, only a
doctor could tell you about a new medicine. You probably never heard of it before you
walked in; you didn't know if it was the only one in the world or one of dozens that did pretty
much the same thing. Now advertisers spend millions of dollars telling you about their
medicines. Advertising puts more information in people's hands. Studies show that drug ads
raise awareness of some conditions so more people seek treatment. And they know more
about their options before seeing the doctor. That's good, right?

But of course the drug companies don't advertise their cheapest products. They promote the
big moneymakers. There's more information out there, but it comes with a heavy dose of
Point-of-View. Sometimes there are two points of view in the same commercial. The FDA
requires that, if you promote the benefits of your medicine, you must also reveal any
significant risks or side effects. So we have them to thank for the now legendary disclaimer
for a weight-loss drug. The medicine worked miracles, but the company was also obliged to
mention it's unpleasant side effects, with the result that the drug turned into a national joke!
Does more information elevate the national dialogue?

Product placement

What are the ethics of advertising that doesn't look like advertising? In a movie chase scene,
the hero and the bad guy are going to need some kind of car to drive. In the theatre we have
no way of knowing whether the director chose those cars because they fulfilled his artistic
vision - or because the car manufacturer made a deal with the producer. The car people get
exciting exposure for their brand and she saves a nice piece of change on her production
budget. Audiences like realism in movies. Made-up brands break the spell because they're
obvious fakes. But the difference between something that's just a prop and something that's a
product promotion is getting murkier all the time, on TV shows as well as movies.

This kind of "product placement" happens in real life, too. If you go out to a club tonight, you
might see some particularly good-looking young people using a new kind of cell phone. It
lets them shoot pictures of people to their friends across the room: "Here's a cute guy - want
to come and meet him?" Fun stuff like that. If you're curious, maybe they've taken your
picture and they'll be happy to show you the phone and let you try it. The phone is very cool.
And the people are what advertisers call "aspirational" because they're way cooler than you
are. They're people you want to be. They're also actors and this is a gig for them. Their job is
creating the impression that using this phone is The Next Trend. If you ask them directly if
they are actors, they won't lie. But if you don't ask, they won't tell. This is the reverse of the
Volvo story. Volvo's demonstration was rigged, no question, but what viewers saw on TV was
the truth. With this cell phone, the demonstration is the absolute truth, but the scene in the
club is pure theater.
(Note: This new "guerrilla" marketing campaign for Sony Ericsson has received a great deal
of negative publicity already for being deceptive in its approach.)

Subliminal advertising

There's one more thing I know you want me to talk about. If you believe subliminal
advertising exists, you don't any more because I embedded a convincing subliminal denial in
this talk. In case you missed it, subliminal advertising is one of those "urban legends." Try
this experiment. Take a photograph of a glass of ice water or the beverage of your choice and
make a fake ad out of it. Then invite people in your Psych department to find the subliminal
messages in your ad. They won't disappoint you.

If a bunch of students can create subliminal messages, imagine what the pros on Madison
Avenue can do.

CONCLUSION

This wouldn't be a talk about ethics in advertising without a word from our sponsor and here
it comes.

80% of American companies have a written Code of Ethics. And probably 100% of you do
too, if you gave it some thought and wrote it down. Ethics happen, or don't, in our
relationships with others. Advertisers are in the business of communicating with thousands,
even millions, of "others" all the time. That gives us thousands or millions of chances to
practice what we believe every day. And try to get it right.

Ogilvy & Mather

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/asr/v008/8.3unit13.html