I’ve been working with advertising agencies for a while now, though I’ve never worked for one. During this time I’ve been able to observe that in the advertising world the client has the priority even over the client’s customers. Sales people for advertising companies or account managers try to learn and embrace the client’s needs even if these needs go against the end user best interest. So I was wondering how ethical is this considering that ad agencies have the job of convincing people to do something that harms their health, financial well being, etc. For example, the ad agency of a cigarette manufacturer needs to convince people that smoking is sexy, hot, cool or even the right thing to do while they know that it’s harmful for their health. Where do we draw the line into what advertising agencies can do?
I think this problem is particularly hard to address because of the fine line defining what is harmful and what is not and the different opinions around, not to mention the big lobbies in congress that try to stop any project that labels these activities as harmful. So these actions are legal and therefore no one will go to jail and the money made will be legal, but I wonder if people could live with the guilt of knowing they are encouraging certain behaviors that harm other people for money.
I’d like to bring this topic up because advertising agencies are now leading companies into the online world which is a more social world and trying to get brands to act as one more friend, which is totally fine, but what about when a friend pulls you to do a bad thing. All the creativity in the world can pull people to drink, smoke, spend extra money in that giant car and many other things and all the creativity in the world can lead to these messages entering the social space. The social space is an space that will be hard to regulate as we cannot attach the creation of a Facebook Like Page to a brand, it may be created by a fan or maybe by the company. Either way it’s almost impossible to try and regulate how we get ads on the social space. If a friend likes Marlboro on Facebook we can’t choose not to see that “ad” unless we choose to lose all our connection with that friend and so advertisers might have successfully found the only way to subtly get us to watch their ads with out being able to choose not to watch them. The problem turns a bit more complicated when I start to like Johnnie Walker Black Label and my 10 year old niece can see that on her Facebook feed. Now it doesn’t matter that we regulate tv times for those ads, because kids aren’t watching TV anyway.
I think the only way to stop this is to think what we like on the Internet, what we are broadcasting to others and above all to start taking our lifestyles above and beyond so that we actually have valuable things to broadcast to others, without losing our personality of course. And for adversting agencies, I think it’s time for them to start to think about the moral implications of what they’ve been doing and try and make a better model out of the online world. They need to stop trying to trick customers in to buying things that could be bad for them and start to actually generate some value and promote the warnings as they promote the products.
