What’s morality’s role in advertising?

Culture

August 27, 2010 by Big Orange Slide

25 Comments

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25 Comments on "What’s morality’s role in advertising?"

Kevin
August 27, 2010 @ 11:36 am

morality’s role doesn’t change for no one. unless your morals permit selling out.
Jacoub Bondre
August 27, 2010 @ 11:37 am

Ohh this one is a toughie. I stand by my claim that there is no more noble a profession than selling beer to Canadians.

That being said, I feel advertising is A-Moral. It is what we as marketers make it out to be. When we can use our skills to meet our client’s business needs, and affect positive change, then we hit the nail on the head.
Curtis Westman
August 27, 2010 @ 11:43 am

Judging from the fallout from an attempt earlier this year by Ashley Madison to hang ads on the TTC promoting their mail-order cuckolding services, it’s a nebulous question. On one hand, the TTC judged the ads unethical and refused to post them, but on the other hand, the fact that the TTC refused to post them resulted in a larger conversation about the ethics and morality of marital infidelity. In that case, it was the policies of the advertising that changed the conversation as well as the conversation that changed the policies of the advertising.

The two concepts definitely cross paths in the metaphysical Venn diagram of philosophy and life, and it might be all the wicked acid techno I’ve been listening to over the past few days, but I’m starting to think a better question could be “What’s advertising’s role in morality?”
Jon Finkelstein
August 27, 2010 @ 11:47 am

I see no one is jumping on this one. So I will try.

Although advertising propagates the dominant ideology of patriarchal capitalism, I don’t think its role is to act morally, per se. Part of morality comes from a brand’s DNA. And another part will come from an agencies values. For example, some agencies won’t take on alcohol or cigs. Others are fine to market to children.

As blasphemous as this may sound, I think advertising’s role is to generate demand. By then, the stance on morality has already been decided by the product itself.
Golden hands
August 27, 2010 @ 11:48 am

What is this morality you speak of?
Soleil
August 27, 2010 @ 11:50 am

Oh goodness – ethics in advertising. Could you pose a more exhaustive question? In the words of Ogilvy & Mather:

“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.”

(http://www.aef.com/on_campus/classroom/speaker_pres/data/3001/:pf_printable?)
Jon Finkelstein
August 27, 2010 @ 11:53 am

Let me be clear. It’s up to the consumer to decide to buy a product or not based on their own set of values. Take cigarettes. If the product and ads are deemed amoral by the public, then no one will buy. And if no one buys, the brand and the campaign die.
Ryan
August 27, 2010 @ 11:53 am

I tend to believe that advertising reflects culture more than it influences it.

What’s more likely to get people driving aggressively; the latest car commercial, or the latest Fast and Furious movie?

When a 13 yo girl watches The Hills, does she want to die her hair, get a fake tan and never eat again because of the make-up and shampoo commercials or because of the starlets on the show?
David Chiavegato
August 27, 2010 @ 11:53 am

I think the late great copywriter, Howard Gossage, said it best:

“To explain responsibility to advertising men is like trying to convince an eight-year-old that sexual intercourse is more fun than a chocolate ice cream cone.”
Vlad Dascalu
August 27, 2010 @ 11:55 am

Sometimes, you just have to pay the bills.
Warren Haas
August 27, 2010 @ 11:57 am

When I worked for my university newspaper, I remember we had a big debate when one of those online casinos wanted to buy a lot of advertising space. We would’ve made a lot of money from it and improved our paper.

Most of the editors were against it, because of how many university students lose money to gambling sites. I was for running the ads, because our paper was going to benefit from it.

I didn’t think it was our responsibility to try to stop people from wasting their money on gambling. That’s their business. We were just a newspaper with almost no funding from our university.

In the end we didn’t run the ads.

I’m pretty sure students still lost a lot of money to those websites. And I know for a fact our paper had a really crappy Christmas party.
Jamie King
August 27, 2010 @ 12:05 pm

Awesome question.

I think morality’s role, or our moral imperative, is to be honest with the consumer in our ideas and communications. At the end of the day our job is to sell. We may be selling beer, we may be selling religion, we may be selling a pair of gloves to Captain Hook.

Whatever it is, staying truthful to consumers and being smart with our ideas and communication and not cheating on my girlfriend is, I believe, the best way to keep it real and right with the world.
Soleil
August 27, 2010 @ 12:05 pm

@Curtis: I agree. The question is better approached when laid out in reverse.

@Jon: “As blasphemous as this may sound, I think advertising’s role is to generate demand. By then, the stance on morality has already been decided by the product itself.”

– I agree to this fact. I believe it is the Advertising Agency’s role to generate demand. From there, it is within the interest of society and the consumers to accept or oppose whatever is being promoted. Look at the how Cigarette Advertising evolved.
Soleil
August 27, 2010 @ 12:07 pm

*Whoops, it seems Jon already typed what I was trying to say. Too fast for me.
Mike Borg
August 27, 2010 @ 12:14 pm

A while back I wrote a paper on the contradictory nature of advertisers as moral agents – specifically American Apparel in the context of Vice Magazine. The polysemic nature of visual images, and their inherent limitations in terms of explicit argumentation – an image can only argue implicitly – have made visual advertising such a controversial space, at least morally.

I can’t legally say “Eh there little fella, smoke butts and you’ll get the girls!”. I can however intimate this idea via some visual imagery. To complicate this, our traditional understanding of morality has been at the point of the individual. In that sense, we need to shift our understanding of the agency, corporation or small business as moral agents, comprised of various stakeholders. This might even be an interesting auditing opportunity. Instead of focusing internally on what you can measure, begin to try and measure the intangible things (morality).
Ean
August 27, 2010 @ 12:40 pm

Personal responsibility is a value I hold dear, but to pretend that inundating people with a certain stimulus doesn’t affect their patterns of behavior is to deny the very psychology that the practice of PR and Advertising was founded on.
Jim Hall
August 27, 2010 @ 1:08 pm

How do you define morality? What are the parameters?
Leilah
August 27, 2010 @ 1:48 pm

@Jim

The question is deliberately left open to interpretation.

But we’re basically discussing whether advertising has a negative impact on a society, or whether it merely reflects and amplies existing behaviours.
simon billing
August 27, 2010 @ 2:30 pm

Great question. The problem for me is that morality is really a personal issue, so that it’s difficult to have a corporate moral code. For example if, back in the old days, your agency took on a cigarette account (because their moral duty is to their share holders) to which you are morally opposed is it sufficient to refuse to work on the account or should you resign and only work for agencies that categorically state they won’t work on tobacco.

The only really moral stance an agency can take is that it will not produce work that knowingly misleads or breaks the law.

I’m certainly not a fan of the champagne morality of Alex Bogusky who makes his fortune off clients, then gets an attack of piety and starts tearing them down. His Damascene conversion came at a very convenient moment in his life.

The other issue your question raises for me is: do ad agencies have some higher duty to be moral than other businesses (because we are in the business of “influencing” people’s decisions)? For me the answer is no. An immoral product is no better or worse than an immoral ad.

Hmm. I think I feel a blog post coming on…
Jacoub Bondre
August 27, 2010 @ 3:36 pm

@simon. Let us know when it is up. I’d love to read it.
Liam Mooney
August 28, 2010 @ 12:51 am

Well I am super late to the game but I will chime in quickly here.

My thought is that companies should be rated on their social/corporate responsibility. That is to say, “Does company X ask for advertising campaigns that are responsible and ethical?”

Ask this question much in the same way we evaluate a company for its environmental compliance or human resources record.

Why? Because there are universal ‘mores’ that transcend culture, time and space. One such value being that advertising to children is wrong. We as adults are duty bound (deontological ethics haha) to protect children from messages that manipulate their inability to filter, comprehend or think critically about the information and messages they receive.

In short, I guess I see morality in a normative sense where it exists constantly and not descriptively where it applies in many but not all cases.

If morality exists in society (which I think most people will admit it does [silly assumption on my part]) than it indeed plays a role in advertising.

That role would be to have corporation/institutions/NGO’s and agencies working in concert to preserve certain moral values in society, one of them I mentioned here.

I am tired, I should sleep.
Jim Monteath
August 28, 2010 @ 5:07 pm

Morality’s role in advertising is the same as morality’s role in anything. It defines what is socially acceptable or at least “in good taste”. For the Canadian advertising industry, the baseline is codified and monitored by Advertising Standards Canada. http://www.adstandards.com/en/

Advertising is judged against the prevailing consensus of public moral standards, so you are always going to offend somebody (even agency staff). Sometimes that’s done intentionally for shock value. If “edgy” works for a brand then use it, but “offensive” doesn’t sell. Controversy may get attention, but advertisers want to attract customers, not repel them.

Therefore I think that Advertising reflects societal mores — including where the boundaries are — rather than influences them. However…

When our sibling Public Relations does positive “spin” on a negative act, that projects an illusion that nothing immoral has taken place. It doesn’t change the definition of morality, it just shows that you can get away with crossing the boundary if you have skillful PR (or powerful lobbyists, good defence lawyers or can convincingly repent to a gullible audience). I personally consider that to be an immoral act to make another immoral act look moral.

Then there’s cousin Propaganda — who no-one likes to talk about — which is definitely designed to influence morality. Its purpose is to make what was immoral yesterday seem acceptable today (or vice versa) especially in the acts done by the glorious “us” to the despicable “them” (or vice versa). Propaganda has the moral integrity of Play-Doh.
Jon Finkelstein
August 29, 2010 @ 10:38 am

@Jim mont. Nailed it
simon billing
August 30, 2010 @ 11:28 am

Some further thoughts on morality in advertising and business at http://www.grumpybrit.com/?p=778
Dondy Razon
August 30, 2010 @ 4:53 pm

This discussion is such a great read!

My 2 cents…

@Jon. I agree with you but I think the role of advertising have evolved from just generating demand. And it has contributed to people’’s frame of reference of morality.

@Soleil. Great quote! We still haven’t gotten it right after all these years :)

@JamieKing. Your answer is my favourite of all! You made it sound so easy and achievable. LIKE BUTTON HERE

@JimMonteath. If propaganda = Play-Doh. Advertising. I think has the integrity of a clean sheet of paper. So it matters what we put on it. And I dunno if we should leave it to the sliding socially acceptable measure!

If I try and answer the question I think I’d just be repeating what’s already been said. So I will try anyway :) Morality impacts Advertising and vise-versa. Both are powerful! And both should be held high on regard in their role and responsibility to consumers and society in general.