10 - The New Advertising
The ongoing debate about the impact of advertising on our daily lives and culture has been ongoing for some time, and is likely to remain a point of contention - as much depends on what each critic believes is best for society and the degree to which advertisers support his personal agenda.
That said, the author examines some of the criticisms of advertising in the present day.
Criticisms of Advertising
The author provides a number of criticisms of advertising raised by a political action group with an environmentalist agenda:
- Advertising creates a false sense of need for products that render no benefit to consumers
- Advertising creates an exaggerated sense of need even for those that do render benefits
- Advertising makes people work harder to earn more to buy things they don't need
- Advertising makes abnormal behavior (which encourages consumption) seem normal
- Advertising makes people base their self-esteem on consumption of goods
- Advertising makes people value material goods over community, self-development, and family
- Advertising makes people unhappy by depicting an ideal they cannot achieve
- Advertising promotes more superficial values to the detriment of more important ones (such as promoting stylishness while ignoring environmental concerns)
- Advertising makes people predisposed to purchase advertised products rather than making a more deliberate decision as to what best suits their interests
(EN: I wonder if this author may be presenting a straw man: not only are these claims somewhat specious, but their source is utterly unqualified - it's clear that their goal is to get advertisers to support their political agenda rather than considering what could be objectively considered as valid ethical concerns. By presenting this list, the author is making critics of advertising seem foolish, and avoiding more difficult and valid issues. )
Ethical Advertising
The current codes of conduct that various industry associations promulgate for advertising are described as "hollow." An advertiser can behave in an obviously ethical manner while remaining in compliance with these various codes. Moreover, none of the codes has any authority, nor any ability to punish or censure advertisers who violate their codes. They are a promise made with fingers crossed.
Neither are regulatory agencies of much assistance: provided that the content of a message is technically true (or cannot be proven to have been false in a courtroom) and does not give egregious offense to public morality, little is ever done by regulatory agencies to hold advertisers to any reasonable standard of ethics.
And while those who controlled the media were once held accountable for advertisements published on their channels, many of the traditional mass-media outlets have become poor watchdogs of the interests of their audience and will run any ad for which they are paid.
The author sees one party as retaining power to compel advertisers to be ethical: the customer. It has been shown that customers place a high value on ethical companies and prefer brands they consider to be responsible, even if it means paying more for those products. It's also been seen that, through the power of the Internet, individual customers do have the ability to punish brands by means of public shaming for advertisements that they find to be objectionable. In this way, advertisers can effectively be held responsible for taking an ethical approach to their activities.
Redefining Value Creation
The author reaches a bit further afield, to suggest that the problems often blamed upon advertising are often misdirected, as the issues are far larger than the messages sent to customers to promote brands, but reaches into the methods by which companies create value.
That is to say that a company is formed to provide value for customers who purchase its products - and they are very seldom criticized for doing so. Instead, critics place upon companies a broader array of burdens to act in ways that are supportive of political agendas of non-customers - whose agenda is to obtain value from a company in ways other than purchasing its products or contributing to its operations.
That is to say, in addition to creating value for customers who purchase products, it creates value for employees by providing careers, value for investors by providing profit, value for government by paying taxes, etc.
There is also the notion that a company also has an impact that is not necessarily related to its creation of products: it consumes natural resources, produces waste and pollution, affects the congestion of roads and other modes of transportation, creates demands for specific kinds of workers, etc.
A fair amount of detail is provided about environmental impacts, as this is fashionable of late, and the notion that companies owe a fair wage and generous benefits to its employees is also mentioned.