Skip to main content icon/video/no-internet
icon backReturn to Entries

Advertising Ethics

In a modern capitalist society, ads are ubiquitous; criticisms of advertising are nearly as common. Some ethical criticisms concern advertising as a social practice, while others attack specific ads or advertising practices. Central to ethical criticisms are concerns that ads subvert rational decision making and threaten human autonomy by creating needs, by creating false needs, by developing one-sided narrowly focused needs that can only be satisfied by buying material products and services, and/or by appealing to genuine and deeply rooted human needs in a manipulative way. A second sort of criticism is that ads harm human welfare by keeping everyone dissatisfied. At a minimum, ads try to make us dissatisfied with not currently having the product, but many ads also aim at keeping us permanently dissatisfied with our social positions, our looks, our bodies, and ourselves. Advertising has been blamed for people today being neurotic, insecure, and stressed.

Business ethicists have traditionally either considered advertising in general or divided ads into information ads, which are ethical as long as they are honest, and persuasive ads, which are always problematic. However, recent literature on advertising ethics considers the division of ads into informative and persuasive to be entirely inadequate because it fails to consider separately the various persuasive techniques that ads use.

Economic Criticisms and the Function of Advertising

One economic criticism of advertising in general is that advertising is a wasteful and inefficient business tool; our standard of living would be higher without it. This criticism fails to understand that economies of scale for mass-produced goods can often more than offset advertising costs, making advertised products cheaper in the end. It is also suggested that advertising causes people to spend money they do not have and that advertising combined with credit cards creates a debt-ridden society, which causes stress and unhappiness. Furthermore, it is claimed that advertising encourages a society based on immediate gratification, which discourages savings and the accumulation of capital needed for a thriving capitalist economy. Granted that American society may currently be deeply in debt, this cannot be blamed on advertising because there are numerous societies that are inundated with ads but have positive savings rates and fiscal surpluses. Canada is one, and there are others in Europe and Asia.

There are also economic defenses of advertising. It has been argued that the creation of consumer demand is an integral part of the capitalist system; capitalism needs advertising since capitalism has an inherent tendency toward overproduction. And capitalism is an economic system that has made us the richest, longest lived, healthiest society in human history; even the poor in consumer societies are better off than most people in the Third World. Surely such well-being makes advertising ethically justified.

Information Ads

Many ads are simple information ads. Consider, for example, the flyers left on your doorstep that say that certain products are on sale at a certain price at a store in your neighborhood. Such ads are generally considered ethical provided they are honest. Problems arise if they make claims that are false, misleading, or exaggerated. Making false claims is a form of lying and, hence, clearly unethical. A claim is misleading if it is literally true, but is understood by most consumers in a way that includes a false claim. The ad is misleading whether or not the advertiser intends the misunderstanding. Generally, the honesty of ads should be judged not on their literal truth, but on how consumers understand the ad; this is because companies have, or can easily get, this understanding of the ad from focus groups and other marketing research techniques. Exaggeration, or puffery, in ads is thought acceptable by many people on the grounds that consumers can be expected to discount claims in ads. This is true except for vulnerable groups such as young children.

...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles

Read next

More like this

Sage Recommends

We found other relevant content for you on other Sage platforms.

close

Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile so that you can save clips, playlists and searches

close
close
close Signed In to profile You are signed in as:
close
Logged in Institution Institution