17/06/2014

1

Advertising Ethics: Arrington, Phillips and Waide

Advertising Ethics

Advertising and marketing are, by now, well-established professions. They are the sort of thing that you can study at university. (Although, as Barbara Phillips notes later on in this section, this has not always been the case).

According to the conventional account, advertising exists

1. to provide consumers with information about price and availability of goods, and most importantly,

2. to introduce consumers to new products that they either need or want.

17/06/2014

2

So even on the conventional account, as Poff notes, there are real ethical questions at stake in the realm of advertising.

What do we, as consumers, really need?

What do we want?

Should we want what we want?

Such questions are aspects of a more general philosophical question that goes back at least to Socrates: What is the good life for humankind?

Advertising has become an ubiquitous world surrounding us, virtually all the time and everywhere. (Count, for fun, how many ads you encounter in the course of your day.)

And many of the products that are being constantly hawked at us are, frankly, trivial or self-indulgent or positively harmful.

We can rightly question whether the vision of the good life that is being offered to us by advertising is something we accept.

17/06/2014

3

The Dependency Effect

Such questions are complicated by claims that advertising does not simply address needs and wants that we already have, but in fact creates wants.

This a claim that John Kenneth Galbraith has argued in The New Industrial State (1967) and The Affluent Society (1969).

Galbraith: Consumer demand is too important to modern corporate business for it to be left up to chance (i.e., individual decision-making). Instead, consumer demand is actively managed through the creation of wants. If marketing expertise can succeed in making people dependant on a product or service, demand becomes predictable.

Even if advertising doesn’t literally create wants, it seems indisputable that ads often exploit and manipulate our existing psychological needs and desires (for security, conformity, sex, power, etc.).

This has been argued as least as far back as Vance Packard in The Hidden Persuaders (1958).

This raises a different sort of ethical question: By manipulating our wants and desires, are advertisers in fact controlling us so as to violate our autonomy?

17/06/2014

4

Arrington: Advertising & Behaviour Control

The question of autonomy is taken up by Robert Arrington.

Arrington initially considers three forms of advertising that may seem to be objectionable on the grounds that they violate autonomy or unjustifiably manipulate our wants and desires…

Puffery The use of exaggerated fantastical or impossible claims. Often such claims are meant to appeal to some hidden psychological need.

A (usually) legal and generally successful ad technique.

e.g., Brand X Cosmetics: “So beautiful other women will want to kill you”; the Nestea Splash, Axe Body Spray, etc.

Indirect Information

The use sheer of repetition and ubiquity (often without any substantive claim being made) to reinforce, e.g., brand identity.

E.g., A1 Steak Sauce, “Where’s the Beef?”, the Nike Swoosh

Subliminal Advertising

The use of messages that are intended to be perceived only “beneath” the level of conscious awareness. Hidden words in photographs, sub-audible message in Muzak, etc.

E.g., the infamous (and possibly fictitious) New Jersey cinema experiment; anti-shoplifting programs.

17/06/2014

5

Wilson Bryan Key, Subliminal Seduction (1974)

Absolut subliminal parody ad (1994)

Do these techniques succeed by violating autonomy? If so, is the violation perhaps justifiable?

“Have we become a community, a herd, of prepackaged souls?” (442)

Arrington notes that these techniques are sometimes defended as acceptable, on various grounds, by advertising experts…

17/06/2014

6

Puffery (Levitt)

If we removed all the exaggerated and fanciful content from ads we would lose something that is at least somewhat valuable in aesthetic or psychological terms.

This sort of advertising offers pleasure, a sense of adventure or a sense of reality transformed in to something more in keeping with our repressed psychological needs. In it’s own modest way, advertising is like art:

“A poem, a temple, a Cadillac—they all elevate our spirits, offering imaginative promises and symbolic interpretations of our mundane activities.” (Theodore Levitt, in Arrington, 459)

Indirect Information (Nelson)

Even when nothing substantive is being communicated about a product, the mere fact that a brand is being advertised is indirectly valuable to consumers.

Why? Well, the brands that are advertised are likely to be a better buy, ceteris paribus, since “loser” products are simply less likely to be advertised (especially if their sales are declining anyway).

This can work to effect a rational outcome, even if the proximate appeal of the ad in question is silly or trivial or irrational (celebrity endorsement of a soft drink, say): The ad has indirectly lead the consumer to better deal than she would have had otherwise, leaving her marginally better off. “Irrationality is rational” says Nelson, “if it is cost-free.” (459)

17/06/2014

7

Subliminal (Arrington)

Subliminal advertising may have no actual defenders, says Arrington, but it is not impossible to imagine a possible defense of them.

If subliminal ads work (and this in itself is debatable), they must work by speaking to psychological proclivities that we already have. (Compare Packard on this point)

And if so, then, well…why not?

“With a little help from our advertising friends, we may remove a few of the discontents of civilization and perhaps enter into the paradise of polymorphous perversity.” (459)

For each of the three techniques that Arrington considers, a “first-order” defense concludes that something internal to us (something “in” us, even if it is only unconscious) cooperates in making the ad technique effective.

But note that this isn’t yet a complete answer to such fundamental questions as “Can advertising violate human autonomy?” or “Can advertising constrain our ability to act on our own reasons?” (Recall Kant here).

17/06/2014

8

In order to answer such questions, says Arrington, we need a “conceptual grasp” of certain ideas, namely:

a) Autonomous desire

b) Rational desire and choice

c) Free choice

d) Control and manipulation

Autonomous Desire

Arrington follows Friedrich Hayek in noting that we cannot equate non-autonomous desires with those that have been culturally induced.

Consider our desires (our taste) for art, music, etc. The only way to acquire desires for such things, it seems plausible to assert, is through cultural indoctrination of one kind or another.

If you grow up in a culture where no one has heard about, say, the operas of Leos Janacek, then you will perforce have no desire to see one. But just because you were born in Brno, and therefore exposed to Janacek’s operas since you were a child, doesn’t mean that you aren’t free to like or dislike The Cunning Little Vixen (1923) or From the House of the Dead (1930).

17/06/2014

9

If only the source of a desire is in question when it comes to determining whether that desire is or was autonomous, then it would seem that we could autonomously desire only those things that are completely unconditioned by culture – e.g., food, warmth, sex, shelter.

(And notice that even for such desires the specific form of the desire is almost always actually culturally conditioned.)

Related: 1st vs. 2nd Order Desires

In the language of the American philosopher Harry Frankfurt:

A recovering kleptomaniac has a first order desire to steal. But if she seeks treatment, she may repudiate her first order desire, by means of a second order desire (a desire to desire) to not have that first order desire.

Frankfurt: Autonomy consists in having a first order desires that are either in accord with or properly constrained by second order desires.

So, the autonomous vs. non-autonomous distinction still stands. But instead of drawing the line between desires that are innate and those that are externally induced, on Frankfurt’s view, the demarcation is between those first order desires that accord with our second order desire and those that do not.

17/06/2014

10

So how does this relate to advertising?

Well, in the case of indirect information ads (A1 Steak Sauce; certain fast food ads that shall go un-named), we may find that we have (suddenly, without our consent) acquired a new first order desire (“Oh. I want a burger now. Must get in the car and head for the drive-thru”).

Now I may well have a contrary second order desire (to lose weight, say, or at least to avoid obesity). But if an ad causes me to act in way which does not accord with my second order desire, we may wish to say, on Frankfurtian grounds, that my autonomy has been violated.

Arrington admits as much, but says that “most of the desires induced by advertising I fully accept” (461).

He offers as evidence for this the fact that we often buy the same product over and over again.

This may amount to question begging, however: If I repeatedly succumb to burger ads, say, my second order desire not to do so may be in place on each and every occasion. Indeed, my second order desire not to break down and simply gratify myself with a burger may become stronger even as I continue to give in to externally induced first order desires.

17/06/2014

11

Rational Desire and Choice

Following the Canadian philosopher David Braybrooke, it might be claimed advertising leads us to act irrationally, to make irrational choices. (e.g., I’d argue, MoneyMart, lotteries).

Well, asks Arrington, what counts as a rational desire…?

We can’t mean desire informed by all of the relevant facts about, say, a product that we are about to purchase, since a) it is impossible to know all the facts about anything, and b) if that’s what we meant, then practically all of our choices would be ipso facto irrational.

If we limit the notion of rational desire to available, relevantknowledge, this leaves open (and unspecified) the criterion of relevance. (Do you, e.g., know or even remotely need to know every engineering detail about your car, e.g.?)

17/06/2014

12

Perhaps the criterion ought to be: All relevant information, given what I want. (That is, my prior desires will determine what the relevant information is.)

Well, says Arrington, isn’t that what advertising does? We might think that this is something like the principle that advertising professionals use to determine what information to include in an ad.

(I want “safe” car and you are selling your cars as “safe.” So you include in your ad the fact that your cars have side-impact air bags, roll-cage construction, etc. You don’t bother to tell me the precise metallurgical details about the metal used to make the cam shaft. That information isn’t directly relevant to my concerns.)

Fair enough (maybe). But indirect information ads (fantasy ads, etc.) provide information that is not factually true. How can that contribute to rational choice?

Arrington: The false information can be seen as contributing to the “subjective effects” created by the ad, and these may be among the things that we are buying when we buy the product.

So buying a subjective effect isn’t necessarily irrational and if a product fails to deliver on the subjective effects promised by the non-factual information in ads, people will simply stop buying the product.

17/06/2014

13

An Available Response Re: Rational Choice

By focusing on effects on individual ads, Arrington may be losing sight of the fact that an ad is typically part of more general marketing strategy.

That fact that advertising encourages us to build up irrational expectations about product X (the next great thing from Apple, say) may in fact be strategic on the part of the marketer. By the time product X turns out not to live up to its irrational hype the product has already been purchased. The consumer is set up for another round of hype and disappointment with product X2.

After all, we have no reason to believe that marketers are actually interested in satisfying our desires (whether rational or irrational) in anything other than an incidental way.

They are ultimately interested in selling products (and perhaps—recall Galbraith—in managing demand), which may or may not involve giving you what you rationally desire.

17/06/2014

14

Free Choice

Sometimes we act on an impulse that we simply do not resist, (we give in to the impulse freely); on the other hand there may be impulses which we cannot resist.

The notion of “acting on a reason” may serve to distinguish between these two sorts of action: A person acts freely if she acts for a reason (i.e. she can provide considerations that justify the action).

A person may act on a whim or impulse, but if she “could have acted otherwise” – that is, she would have acted otherwise if there was a reason do so and she was aware of that reason –she still acts freely.

A person’s action is unfree if she has a reason not do perform that action and is aware of that reason, yet does so anyway. (e.g., a kleptomaniac, an addict)

An ad may make me want some expensive consumer good (a BMW, say). If I know that I can’t afford and/or don’t really need the product, and I don’t act on the urge that the ad has instilled in me, I am acting freely. If I can’t afford or don’t really need and I do purchase it anyway, then I have presumably fallen victim to a compulsion caused by an ad.

But, says Arrington, we can’t condemn ad campaigns in general, just because some purchasers are compelled and some are not.

17/06/2014

15

Control and Manipulation

On Arrington’s account, C controls P if:

1) C intends P to act in a certain way A;

2) C’s intention is causally effective in bringing about A; and

3) C intends to ensure that all of the necessary conditions of A are satisfied.

It follows from this account that to control another person’s behaviour it is not sufficient that one’s actions cause a change in that person’s behaviour, one must also intend to cause the change. Moreover, “the intention must give rise to the conditions which bring about the intended effect” (446).

So can advertising control us? Well, says Arrington, advertisers can’t really be said to intend to sell a product. Instead, they hopeto sell a product.

Consider the distinction between education and brainwashing: A teacher seeks only to influence her students – to provide them with ideas that they may absorb if they wish (she presumably intends to change her students beliefs, but she doesn’t set about directly changing their personalities in order to do so). A brainwasher, by contrast, intends to change someone’s beliefs directly, and will do whatever it takes to do so.

Advertising, for the most part, is more like education than brainwashing, according to Arrington, since the advertiser typically appeals to desires that we already have.

17/06/2014

16

A Response Re: Control

Again consider the larger picture – what is it that the advertiser intends overall?

Not to control me (this particular named individual), it’s true (although this isn’t so much referential opacity as a practical problem about information).

But if “advertorial brainwashing” were possible, why wouldn’t an advertiser be willing to intend it? It is presumably what advertising would ideally consist in.

Phillips: Advertising and Society

As we have seen, there are at least two respects in which advertising might be held to be morally culpable:

1) Individual ads or ad campaigns may be intentionally deceptive about matters of fact. Obviously, this does happen from time to time and it is, at least to that extent, a genuine social problem.

But it is equally obvious that there is nothing unique to advertising when it comes to outright deception. Intentional deception is prima facie wrong wherever and whenever it occurs – advertising is just one specific venue where such deception might occur…

17/06/2014

17

2) More problematic, and more specific to advertising as a practice are the sorts of concerns that we have looked at in connection with Arrington’s article.

That is, insofar as advertising manipulates pre-existing desires and wants, and especially insofar as advertising actually creates wants and desires, advertising may be held to be an unjustifiable sort of control over people—i.e., a threat to autonomy.

As Barbara Phillips points out, both of these views pertain to a narrowly ethical treatment of advertising, i.e., at the level of individuals. She, on the other hand, is interested in looking at the collective effects of advertising on society

Materialism

In particular, Phillips asks whether and to what extent advertising contributes to materialism and its associated negative effects. For Phillips, this has three aspects:

a) elevation of consumption over other social virtues

b) the use of goods to satisfy social needs

c) general dissatisfaction with one’s life.

Phillips’ (perhaps somewhat surprising) conclusion is that it is not advertising per se, but capitalism as a whole that propagates the harmful effects of materialism in society…

17/06/2014

18

Phillip’s “Just So” Story of Advertising

In pre-industrial society social guidance about what is available, about “what’s what” in the wider world, came from one’s immediate family, one’s extended family, one’s leader and elders.

Industrialism led to a radical displacement of these roles…

Urbanization splits apart extended families

Technological change both exposes people to a wider world and makes traditional knowledge less authoritative.

At the same time (as Marx and Engels famously described in their theory of alienation), industrial production brings many more products into the marketplace and, significantly, separates individuals from direct, personal connection with production.

In contrast to traditional, pre-industrial society, in modern industrialized society it is often simply not obvious, for any given product, who made this thing, how this thing was made, what purpose this thing was made for.

17/06/2014

19

So, in some sense, advertising emerges in order to replace the social institutions that have been disrupted and weakened by industrialization and technology.

This is reflected in changes in advertising practice: If you look at newspaper from a recently as, say, 1860, what you will notice that there are lots of ads that simply indicate the attributes of products and provide information about price and availability.

By contrast, if you look in a magazine or newspaper from about 1920, you will see a developed form of a new sort of advertising that doesn’t simply describe the product but instead, describes the social meaning of the product. (”Persons of distinction drive a Packard.”; “A fit body means a fit nation – Eat Kellogg’s Wheat Flakes!”)

As Phillips points out, this sort of “social meaning” advertising can serve a very real and valuable function for people by helping to order the world of social expectations and therefore reduce anxiety.

(Even though, as we have seen with Arrington, advertising may also create new anxieties ex nihilo.)

Under some description, then, advertising has become what some Marxists call a hegemony. That is, a socially constructed way of seeing the world.

As Phillips notes, this advertising hegemony may subsist at the collective level even as something apparently much more straightforward is going on at the individual level.

17/06/2014

20

Consider a TV advertisement for Dow Bathroom Cleaner (or virtually any of its contemporary equivalents)

Manifest Content:

“Dow Bathroom Cleaner makes cleaning your bathroom much easier.” This is apparently a “reason why” claim that an individual is presumably free to accept or reject.

Latent Content:

“This is what a normal bathroom looks like”; “A sparkling clean bathroom is an important goal”…

The social information contained in the latent content is not presented as something for the viewer to accept of reject: The normative picture of a sparkling clean bathroom is presented simply as “reality” – as the normal background against which a purchase decision should be made.

Repeat x 3000 or so (That’s the average number of TV ads viewed per month by the average North American, according to some sources)…

Advertising might plausibly be said to have built up a pervasive, hegemonic system of social expectations and social rules. A complete picture of what’s what and what’s available in the wider world….

17/06/2014

21

Phillips invite us to consider the increasingly solitary individual, barricaded alone in front of his multimedia screen, isolated from society except for the information he receives through the mass media.

What will such a person take to “normal”? What will such a person take to be the state of the world and his role in it?

Advertising and Capitalism

Phillips wants to distinguish between advertising as an instrumentality and the intentions with which that instrumentality is used. In the modern industrialized world that agency that controls advertising (in a rather broad sense of the word “agency”) is capitalism.

Advertising may create certain harmful effects, viz.:

a) elevation of consumption over other social virtues

b) the use of goods to satisfy social needs

c) general dissatisfaction with one’s life.

But advertising itself is only the proximate cause of such harmful effects. The ultimate cause is capitalism.

17/06/2014

22

Advertising, Phillips notes, may have great social influence, but it has no explicit, necessary social responsibilities. (I.e., beyond refraining from outright deception and conforming to information requirements imposed by law, e.g. Health Canada warnings on cigarettes.)

Commercial advertising, it seems plausible to assume, exists for one purpose only, namely to sell products. There is, for example, no fiduciary responsibility to tell the truth in advertising (again, barring deception).

So it perhaps not surprising that “every ad addresses the dilemmas of modern life with a single all-purpose solution: Buy something.” (quoting Gold, 471)

Consumption and Materialism

Any given ad promotes a specific brand but, on a social level, the thousands of ad that the average North American absorbs every month “leads to a presentation of goods [in general] as the solution to all of life’s problems” (472).

In short, advertising contributes to, perhaps directly causes, the social problem of materialism…

17/06/2014

23

But says Phillips, North American culture was notably materialistic even before the rise of modern advertising. So advertising can’t be the cause (or at any rate, the sole cause) of materialism.

This is a rather weak argument if it is taken to mean that advertising, per se, ought not to be controlled.

Consider: People killed each other often enough before the invention of handguns.

More to the point, Phillips indicates that in a capitalist society, a brisk cycle of production/obsolescence/consumption is requiredby the economic system.

Indeed, achievement in a capitalistic society is mostly measured in by increased accumulation, for individuals, and by increased consumption as a justification of the capitalist order itself.

(Call this the “don’t talk with your mouth full” argument for capitalism – a sub-species of the invisible hand argument, you’ll note.)

That advertising per se can be separated from the capitalist cycle of ever-increasing consumption, says Phillips, is shown by the occasional successful public service ad. (E.g.: The American Heart Association TV ad: “Turn off the TV and go play with your kids; the exercise will do you both good”)

17/06/2014

24

Use of Goods to Satisfy Social Needs

Ads are often structured to associate a product with some sort of social meaning or normative expectation. “We are not just buying a product, we are buying a way of life” (474).

But every society attaches social meaning to some objects, including societies without advertising. So the fundamental question should not be about what medium is used to convey social meaning, but about what social meaning is being conveyed. (in, e.g., religious advertising, we see the instrumentality of advertising used to convey social meaning that is not dictated by capitalism.)