ETHICS IN ADVERTISING

BY,
ARATHY ANAS ANITA ANOOP ALANA

Advertising is a form of communication that typically attempts to persuade potential customers to purchase or to consume more of a particular brand of product or service. ... a public promotion of some product or service the business of drawing public attention to goods and services

TYPES OF ADVERTISING:

Media: Commercial advertising media include wall paintings, , radio, cinema and television adverts, web banners, mobile telephone screens, shopping carts, web popups, skywriting, bus stop benches, magazines, newspapers, town criers, sides of buses, banners attached to or sides of airplanes ("logojets"), in-flight advertisements on seatback tray tables or overhead storage bins, taxicab doors, roof mounts and passenger screens, musical stage shows, subway platforms and trains, elastic bands on disposable diapers, stickers on apples in supermarkets, shopping cart handles

Television commercials:The TV com mercial is generally considered the most effective mass-market advertising format.The annual Super Bowl football game in the United States is known as the most prominent advertising event on television.

Infomercials: There are two types of infomercials,

described as long form and short form. Long form infomercials have a time length of 30 minutes. Short form infomercials are 30 seconds to two minutes long. Infomercials are also known as direct response television (DRTV) commercials or direct response marketing.

Celebrities:This type of advertising focuses upon using celebrity power, fame, money, popularity to gain recognition for their products and promote specific stores or products. MEDIAS OF ADVERTISING: Some commercial advertising media include: billboards, printed flyers, radio, cinema and television ads, web banners, skywriting, bus stop benches, magazines, newspapers, town criers, sides of buses, taxicab doors and roof mounts, elastic bands on disposable diapers, the opening section of streaming audio and video, and the backs of event tickets. Any place an "identified" sponsor pays to deliver their message through a medium is advertising. Covert advertising embedded in other entertainment media is known as product placement.

Ethics in Strategy Formulation

Advertisement persuade the people to buy their products. It sometime entertain or educate the people.

Some advertisers use slippery tactics.

The Question is that : are these strategies are ethical ? Do the companies having the obligation to tell the truth or does the goal of selling the product override such ethical concerns ?

Advertising strategies
When advertising a product, advertisers will use several methods . Most popular ones are: Celebrity endorsements Product comparison. Price comparison. Selling a dream or life style.

Obviously, some strategies have the ability to be more subjective than others. For example, when using the strategy of selling a lifestyle, many businesses will work hard to create a brand image. That image may be associated with status, lifestyle, or success. When selling a product with that brand, advertisers will then focus on selling that image. It may not necessarily have anything to do with the real value or quality of the product itself. The customer is simply buying the name and the concepts that go along with it. However, owning that product will likely not truly change the reality of the consumers status. Is it therefore ethical to sell the image instead of the product? Is it truthful?

It is morally wrong to use manipulative, exploitative, corrupt and corrupting methods of persuasion and motivation. The techniques involved in advertising certain products like glamorous settings associated with superficially glamorous people.

Another important aspect is it relies on false information.

Principles that are particularly relevant to advertising are truthfulness , the dignity of the human person, and social responsibility

Ethical Concerns

Advertising typically plays upon emotions. It uses desire to lure people into the purchase. Creating that desire is a task that requires a certain amount of illusion. Advertisers must create a scenario that heightens the consumers emotional state. No matter what strategy they use, they are always building a fantasy one in which the consumers life is better because of the product.

BENEFITS OF ADVERTISING

Economic Benefits of Advertising

Advertising can play an important role in the process by which an economic system guided by moral norms contributes to human development. It is a necessary part of the functioning of modern market economies. Advertising can be a useful tool for sustaining honest and ethically responsible competition that contributes to economic growth in the service of authentic human development.

Advertising informs people about the availability of rationally desirable new products and services and improvements in existing ones, helping them to make informed, contributing to efficiency and the lowering of prices, and stimulating economic progress through the expansion of business and trade. All of this can contribute to the creation of new jobs, higher incomes and a more decent and humane way of life for all.

Benefits of Political Advertising

Political advertising can make its contribution by informing people about the ideas and policy proposals of parties and candidates, including new candidates not previously known to the public. Political advertising can make a contribution to democracy analogous to its contribution to economic well being in a market system guided by moral norms.

Cultural Benefits of Advertising

Advertising can itself contribute to the betterment of society by uplifting and inspiring people and motivating them to act in ways that benefit themselves and others. Advertising can brighten lives simply by being witty, tasteful and entertaining.

Moral and Religious Benefits of Advertising

In many cases, too, benevolent social institutions, including those of a religious nature, use advertising to communicate their messages. Messages of faith, of patriotism, of tolerance, messages concerning health and education, constructive and helpful messages that educate and motivate people in a variety of beneficial ways.

THE HARM DONE BY ADVERTISING

a) Economic Harms of Advertising

Advertising can betray its role as a source of information by misrepresentation and by with holding relevant facts The practice of "brand"-related advertising can raise serious problems. Often there are only negligible differences among similar products of different brands, and advertising may attempt to move people to act on the basis of irrational motives ("brand loyalty," status, fashion, "sex appeal," etc.) instead of presenting differences in product quality and price as bases for rational choice. It makes consumers forget abt there needs n only think abt their wants, which makes them spend more

b) Harms of Political Advertising

for example, the costs of advertising limit political competition to wealthy candidates or groups, or require that office-seekers compromise their integrity and independence by over-dependence on special interests for funds. instead of being a vehicle for honest expositions of candidates' views and records,political advertising seeks to distort the views and records of opponents and unjustly attacks their reputations.

c) Cultural Harms of Advertising

In the competition to attract ever larger audiences and deliver them to advertisers, communicators can find themselves tempted in fact pressured, subtly or not so subtly to set aside high artistic and moral standards and lapse into superficiality, tawdriness and moral squalor Communicators also can find themselves tempted to ignore the educational and social needs of certain segments of the audience the very young, the very old, the poor who do not match the demographic patterns (age, education, income, habits of buying and consuming, etc.) of the kinds of audiences advertisers want to reach

Exploitation of women by advertisements:objects whose purpose is to satisfy others' appetite for pleasure or for power the role of woman as wife and mother undervalued or even ridiculed the role of women in business or professional life depicted as a masculine caricature

d) Moral and Religious Harms of Advertising

it deliberately appeals to such motives such as envy, status seeking and lust. some advertisers consciously seek to shock and titillate by exploiting content of a morbid, perverse, pornographic nature. the communications media have made pornography and violence accessible to a vastly expanded audience, including young people and even children, and a problem which at one time was confined mainly to wealthy countries has now begun, via the communications media, to corrupt moral values in developing nations.

commercial advertisers sometimes include religious themes or use religious images or personages to sell products. It is possible to do this in tasteful, acceptable ways, but the practice is obnoxious and offensive way.

EXAMPLES

companies try all sorts of tactics to get our attention and money. Some examples of illegal tricks involve the old bait and switch. This tactic requires placing an ad for an item at tremendous value. Upon reaching the store, the shoppers finds that the item is "no longer available" and in order to alleviate their sorrow at missing the deal they are directed to a similar item that, while not as good of a bargain (sometimes no bargain at all) closely matches what they came in for.

An example would be an ad for a brand new computer with DVD, cd-writer and free software for only $600. What a bargain! As soon as you inquire: "I'm sorry, we're all sold out of that amazing deal, but since you need a computer, I can show you this one. It only has half as much processing power, ram or hard drive. If you need the DVD, I can have one installed for only $99..." and off you go being sold an item that you didn't initially want

Children who are enticed through advertising to believe that Pokemon Cereal is something they must have. The advertisers claim that this sugar-laden, almost nonnutrient product is part of a nutritious breakfast is misleading. Children who are allowed to consume sugary foods usually do so at the expense of eating other, more nutritious foods (Zoll, 2001). As such, their health suffers. This applies to advertising for chips, soda pop, and numerous other junk foods. Children simply cant differentiate between healthy foods and those that have little nutritional value, but they are pushed by the media to see those foods as the best choice. This is truly unethical.

Alltel also hired people to go into public chat rooms on the Internet and ask about the new Alltel product Boomerang. Once again the large corporation used human nature of curiosity to sell the product

the collective, experiential and logical evidence makes it more likely that advertising and promotional activities do stimulate cigarette consumption Encourages children and young adults to experiment tobacco

Conclusion
Advertising is an important element in today's society, especially in the functioning of a market economy, which is becoming more and more widespread. Yet it also can do, and often does, grave harm to individuals and to the common good

THANK YOU