Ethical Issues in Advertising

Abstract

In the modern competitive environment/ advertising plays a major role. It helps to establish relationships between human desires and production and/ in so doing, makes possible mass production and mass consumption. Advertising is such an integral part of our everyday life that we sometimes forget its relatively recent origin. Though people have made and exchanged goods and services from time immemorial, it was only in the late nineteenth century that advertising began to foster and to influence these makings and exchanges. Before long, it was a substantial industry in its own right. And from its beginnings, the promotion of goods and services by third parties has been a controversial activity. By taking advantage of the technologies of mass media, advertisers and advertising have been subject increasingly to public suspicion and antipathy. In recent years, this suspicion and antipathy has risen, on occasion, to active distrust and organized opposition. Recently, much has been said about honesty in advertising. In the haze of accusations, three points stand out. It is asserted that advertising lives on implied half-truths, cultivates distortions, and often misleads more than it informs. It is asserted that instead of satisfying real human needs, advertising creates insatiable wants that would not otherwise exist. And it is asserted that advertising wastes the real wealth of an economy by enticing people into purchases injurious to their best interests. In several countries in recent years, persons from outside the advertising industry—from government, from the public at large, or from both—have seriously damaged the effectiveness of advertising as an economic tool. The results to the social environment are a broad misunderstanding of the economic value of advertising and the suspicion of hidden, "sinister" powers at work. The result for the advertising industry are restrictions on the amount of advertising space and time permitted, arbitrary taxes on advertising, or even prohibitions on the use of certain media ...