Comm 2041

Creative Industries & Ethics 2008

Ethics in advertising?

Some quotes to start us off:

“…Advertising is the ‘lubricant of the free-enterprise system…” (Kelmenson in McKenna, 1983, p11)

“…Advertising is essential to the look and feel of modern societies…In their images and phrases, these advertisements give public form to changing social desires, moods and ideals: they are the official art or modern capitalist society…” (Williams, in Sinclair, 1997, p267)

“…Salesmanship, advertising, the telephone…are all really just ways of mediating human interaction…these and most other media…have turned into avenues of behaviour and thought control…The art of manipulation has become…prevalent…We are living through end-stage propaganda, a culture which has been subjected to so much…programming – that it exhibits pathological symptoms…” (Rushkoff, 1999, pp25-26)

“…Advertising is legalised lying…” (Wells in Jackman, 1982, p2)

Some ad text groundwork:

I’d like us all to recognise that:

ads are texts just like novels or films (but texts that have ‘promotional intent’)

ads are public texts that circulate freely (but they have preferred readings, and that preference is commercial)

as a first principal all these texts in circulation in a ‘free society’ should be subject to the ethical scrutiny of its citizens

Some ad text groundwork:

2) I’d like us to also consider the ethics of advertising in three ‘ranges’, in much the same way as you have been doing in analysing ethical dilemmas. So we might consider:

‘Micro range’. This deals with the everyday issues of ‘problematic’ advertisements that interact with the broad sweep of changing individual moral norms

Mid range. Here we enter the area that Elspeth Probyn and Catherine Lumby cover in this week’s reading. I call it ‘boundary blurring’ and it has to do with our increasing inability to distinguish between ads and non ads in media content

Macro. This final area deals with the biggest issues, the notion of a mental landscape, our imagination effectively, completely ‘colonised’, at both an individual and a collective level by promotional rhetoric

Some ethical framework revision

1) ‘Teleological’ philosophies determine the moral worth of a behaviour by its consequences or end point. Two common teleological theories are egoism, in which individuals focus only on the consequences to themselves when evaluating an ethical situation, and utilitarianism, where the consequences of an ethical situation to the whole of society are more important than the consequences to an individual (the good of the many outweighs the good of the one)

2) Aretaic or ‘virtue’ philosophies, where it is the actor that is important, not necessarily the outcome. In virtue ethics a ‘good person’ has personal qualities such as courage, wisdom, loyalty and fairness. These virtues should be used ‘in balance’ between extremes of possible conduct (This is the ‘golden mean’)

Some ethical framework revision

3) ‘Deontological’ philosophies on the other hand emphasises the act. Duty ethics posit an ethics not based on ‘fuzzy’ ideas of individual virtue, but on the idea that some things are ‘universally right or wrong’ and that these ‘laws’ should compel us to do the right thing because it becomes our ‘duty’ to do so. Kant is at the extreme end of Duty ethics, Ross’ ‘pluralistic theory of value’ is less so because it allows multiple duties

4) ‘Relativist’ philosophies would have us believe that no universal ethical rules can exist that apply to everyone in every situation because all beliefs are culturally generated - not timeless and ‘handed to us from above’

Some of the most persistent ‘micro’ & ‘midrange’ criticisms of

advertising ethics include: That it takes advantage of ‘innocent’ and ‘defenceless’

children - either by utilising the ‘pester power’ effect to control purchases through their parents, or by marketing goods and services to children considered by many to be to young to either understand the ‘persuasive intent’ of the ad or too young to actually need the good or service (i.e. the selling of cosmetics or high end lingerie to young girls)

That it uses sex to sell, more specifically that it reduces women (and increasingly men) to sex objects

That it uses ‘shock’ (cruelty, violence, disgust, pornography etc etc) to sell = Benetton. i.e. it trivialises very serious aspects of the human condition

Some of the most persistent ‘micro’ & ‘midrange’ criticisms of advertising include:

That it promotes unhealthy and unrealistic body image expectations in young women and young men, and the idea that the solution to these ‘problems’ can be found in the marketplace

That it sells and glamorises harmful (but legal) substances like alcohol, tobacco, and certain ‘lifestyle’ drugs - and encourages/normalises unhealthy eating habits

That it is reactive, rather than proactive, in its depiction of racial/ethnic/religious/gender and age stereotypes. For instance - how many Aboriginal faces or aged people are there in Australian advertising?

Some of the most persistent ‘micro’ & ‘midrange’ criticisms of advertising include:

That it commodifies aspects of life that should be part of a person’s basic human rights (i.e. the ‘right’ to medical treatment gets replaced by luxury private health cover)

That, particularly in the age of the internet and the mobile phone, it invades people’s privacy by collecting data about them without their knowledge or express consent

That in the age of convergence, advertisers are increasingly ‘hiding’ their persuasive message behind a mask of ‘journalism’ or celebrity (i.e. Advertorials, cash for comment), or entertainment (magalogs, infomercials, product placement), or just mediums that are considered to be part of the realm of everyday speech (blog-ads)

Some of the most persistent criticisms of the ad industry as a whole include:

That it is ‘designed’ to be deceptive, and moreover, that it less and less serves to inform us believably about logical ‘basic product information’ such as price, place and performance (is ‘fat’ free really fat free?), and inserts emotionality - dreams, hopes, fears in their place (‘be what you want to be’)

That it ‘dumbs down’ civil discourse by transforming complex issues (like politics and the environmental crisis) into celebrity contests and ‘greenwash’ respectively

That it sets up a regime of success, luxury and desire that poor people can see but never attain

Some of the most persistent criticisms of the ad industry as a whole include:

That it is not subject to enough government regulation and that the industry’s attempt to ‘self regulate’ is a self-contradictory joke

That it disguises human suffering and inequality behind its ‘brilliant disguise’ (i.e. exploitation of coffee workers)

That the political/economic thrust of the industry is to dismantle public limits to unregulated promotionality (by lobbying to weaken legislative restrictions on ads) and replace them with individual/ familial ‘self regulation’ (i.e. to ‘discipline the parent’ into feeling that they alone are responsible for supervising their child’s ‘ad exposure’ and that if they fail to do that they are bad parents)

At a simple level of ‘deception’, Davis (1994, p381) lists four types of

practises that all promotional texts could be accused of to some extent: ‘Puffery’ - use of hyperbole or unbelievable exaggeration

Use of generalisations about products where specific details

are required, leading to false expectations about utility

Use of qualifiers and vague quantifiers

Use of small or fleeting fine print, or ads that don’t include crucial information

And I will add another, overriding ethical objection:

Advertising too often doesn’t ‘respect’ people as fully developed individuals and citizens with goals beyond the immediate purchase

One final observation:

In a digital, interactive world of: ‘viral’ messages spread ‘voluntarily’ by users, of micro-targeted SMS campaigns, of multiple product placements in reality TV shows that are

themselves ads for the contestants, and where individuals can increasingly ‘advertise

themselves’ online via blogs

What is persuasion, what is deception, what is

truth, and how do we hold people to it???

Remember - advertising industry workers are customers too!

Dilemmas faced by advertising professionals potentially

impact on their own children!

Example case study issues

Example case study issues

Example case study issues

And now for something completely different:

http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/watch/default.htm?program=mediawatch&pres=20081013_2120&story=4

‘Micro’ case study 1 - Shock and fear in advertising

‘Micro’ case study 2 - Advertising to children http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtJMdXM5oIk

‘Micro’ case study 3 - Greenwash

‘Mid-macro’ case study 1 - can advertising disguise exploitation?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhVNZt1aOc8

‘Mid-macro’ case study 2 - ‘Boundary blurring’

A Micro-mid ‘Conclusion’:

How do we proceed from here at the practical level of individual ad texts and the industries that create, sell and are funded by them? Patterson and Wilkins mention Baker and Martinson’s ‘TARES’ test, which has become an influential tool in the study of advertising ethics

In the tutes it would be useful to look at this test and evaluate its usefulness, perhaps test it against some ‘real world ads’, and consider whether adherence to this test is a realistic expectation in the harsh light of coalface industry

…And a ‘Macro’ Question:

At the macro level the question is whether marketers should have access to every corner of the media and every corner of our creative brain space - is the world really, as Douglas Rushkoff has stated, now just “…made of marketing…”?

There is “…an increasingly desperate need to preserve a space for other forms of thinking, other shades of feeling and other ways of being in the world…” (p148) “…so conditioned are we to expect advertising and almost no other form of address in our public spaces that we naturally assume that a printed, mass produced image must be there to sell us something…” (Poyner, R, p180)

Conclusions? Are there absolute standards of right and

wrong that individuals, advertising industry professionals and societies should adhere to?

Does the ‘pleasure’ produced by adverts outweigh the damage they cause?

Or is it all a relativist ‘free for all’ where the ‘viewer/buyer’ beware holds true

Where do ‘virtue ethics’ notions like obligation, responsibility, accountability and ‘excellence of character’ come into this?

Conclusions?

Are there ‘special interest groups’ of especially vulnerable people out there that deserve ethical (and legal) protection form this marketing ‘free for all’?

If so, who are they and why?

Conclusions? Does self regulation by advertising peak

bodies (as seen in the AFA and AANA Codes of Ethics, which I have put up on the CI&E website) work?

Can we trust for profit organisations that answer to shareholders first to behave responsibly?

What kind of legislation would you pass to legally oversee ad standards, or would you take a hands off approach and let the industry ‘self regulate’?

Conclusions?

Is the ethical crux of a potentially controversial admaking decision today - especially in a digital, interactive, ‘boundary blurring’ world where it is increasingly hard to tell what is and isn’t an ad - seated with the actor, the act, the outcome, the ‘rules’, or is it just all relative?

Is ‘any publicity good publicity’? Have YOU ever been shocked or disgusted or saddened by an ad enough to want it changed, restricted or banned? What was the ad?

Why ‘TARES’?

“…Whereas professional persuasion is a means to an immediate and instrumental end (such as increased sales or enhanced corporate image), ethical persuasion must rest on or serve a deeper, morally based final (or relative last) end. Among the moral final ends of journalism, for example, are truth and freedom…

…There is a very real danger that advertisers and public relations practitioners will play an increasingly dysfunctional role in the communications process if means continue to be confused with ends in professional persuasive communications. …” (Baker & Martinson, 2001)

Ethical Questions Derived from the 5 point TARES test (adapted from Lieber 2003)

TRUTHFULNESS (of the message)

1. The accuracy of the content 2. Whether the communicator’s own honesty and integrity may be questioned as a result of this communication decision 3. Whether the communicator would feel deceived if this communication was related to him/her in the same context.

AUTHENTICITY (of the persuader)

1. That the communicator would personally advocate the view he/she is presenting 2. People receiving the information will benefit from it 3. That the communicator would openly assume personal responsibility for the communication.

RESPECT (for the persuadee)

1. That the target audience is viewed by the communicator with respect 2. Self-interest is being promoted at the expense of those being persuaded.

EQUITY (of the appeal)

1. Whether the target audience was unfairly selected due to their vulnerability to the content 2. The context of the communication is fair 3. The target audience can completely understand the information being presented to them.

SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY (for the common good)

1. The view being advocated might cause harm to individuals or society 2. That the content of the communication promoted the principles the communicator personally believes in 3. Certain groups might be unfairly stereotyped by this communication

Useful Websites

Australian Communications and Media Authority http://www.acma.gov.au/

Commercial television Code of Practice http://www.acma.gov.au/WEB/STANDARD/pc=PC_90096

Australian Association of National Advertisers (AANA) http://www.aana.com.au/

Advertising Federation of Australia (AFA) http://www.afa.org.au/