Are Advertisements Honest?

 

The field of advertising is extremely broad and diverse. In general terms, of course, an advertisement is simply a public notice meant to convey information and invite patronage or some other response. As that suggests, advertising has two basic purposes: to inform and to persuade, and — while these purposes are distinguishable — both very often are simultaneously present. But is informing and persuading both in line with each other? If you try to persuade, does it mean you inform the consumers the truth? If you inform, does it capture the minds (and the pockets) of the consumers? Not all the time, as I personally think about it.

Advertisers are selective about the values and attitudes to be fostered and encouraged, promoting some while ignoring others. This selectivity gives the lie to the notion that advertising does no more than reflect the surrounding culture. Now let's look at a more subtle shade of truth in an infamous Volvo commercial I read. In a real-life monster truck show, the Volvo was the only car left uncrushed - a great idea for a commercial! But to make the ad, the film company needed to shoot several takes. So they reinforced the beams inside the car to stand repeated squashing. When this came out in the press, Volvo was pilloried and their ad agency got fired, ultimately going out of business. Did it serve them right? Or was it a bum rap? No question the demo was rigged. But what it showed was the truth: if a monster truck runs over you once, you're safer in the Volvo. Is the advertisement itself honest? Technically, yes! Because one take has left the Volvo uncrushed. But how many takes did it take to crush the Volvo? Countless. So is Volvo’s marketing department and ad agency honest? That is for a consumer to decide.

 Advertising in itself is useful tool for sustaining competition by informing people of the availability of rationally desirable new products and services and improvements in existing ones. But Advertising weakens or undermines personal autonomy; that some kinds of advertising are immoral. Advertising plays on human desires for security, acceptance, and self-esteem to influence consumer choices. And as future business leaders, we have to take responsibility in Ethical Advertising. We have to make sure that: we respect truthfulness, the dignity each human person, and social responsibilities.

Corporate Consumer Responsibility

Before corporations and businesses dip their hands to contribute to the society, they have to make sure they have responsibilities to the welfare of the most important aspect of their business, the consumers. After tackling the Ford-Firestone case and pointing out different ethical issues like the labor issues and their inability to disclose information to the public, it all boils down to one question – what is your responsibility to consumers? What duty do we have to our buyers to make sure we don’t take advantage of the consumers being misinformed?

Before even selling, we need to make sure our products (or services) are safe enough to be consumed by millions of people. In the Ford-Firestone case, consumers do not know that a tire problem exists in Ford Explorers that could cause a rollover and could (and had) cause countless casualties. Ford did not just undisclose these facts, but they could’ve done better testing to check its reliability especially that the lives of the people are at risk.

 

When it comes to advertising, we also have a responsibility to persuade, but not manipulate. Being a part-time financial advisor trainee, I was able to open my eyes on different techniques of selling – which unfortunately, involves deception at seldom times. Since I work at a life insurance company, insurance is a tough product to sell to consumers, especially when the majority of the market is not financially literate. A deceptive example would be presenting to potential clients his/her financial needs through Living on Interest financial planning process. It involves determining your needed amount to provide for the family assuming that the only means for you to earn regularly is through interests. So if your monthly income is Php50,000, and the interest rate is at 4%, then you will need at least Php15M worth of cash to sustain your basic needs. This process could be effective because for it could trigger people’s sense of urgency to get a life insurance and mutual fund as early as possible and convince them to contribute large amounts as much as possible to meet the need. Though this may be still be beneficial in the long run, convincing them that they need a large amount of money just to sustain current needs is just wrong because of several reasons: one – it assumes that the only way for you to earn would be to rely on interests alone and two – it is not okay for you to touch the Php15M because it will impact your monthly minimum earnings. From the beginning, I knew that this style of computation is very deceiving so I committed to myself not to present this kind of presentation.

Pre-Service Learning:Handog Tungkod Project

My lola became became handicapped because of a simple accident of slipping in her bathroom. Just a minor slip caused her the next 5 years of her life, even until death, to stay in bed most of the time. She was transferred from Bulacan to our home in Las Pinas so hospitals are more accessible and visits from relatives will be easier. I was able to see her perseverance with a physical therapist to get her feet up and try to walk again on her own. After 2 years of physical therapy sessions, we accepted the fact that she won’t be able to walk anymore and use a wheelchair instead. She was sitting in a wheelchair when God decided it was already her time.

Handog Tungkod Project’s mission is to give a cane to every elderly person in the Philippines. It may sound quite simple as a service learning activity but it is very close to my heart. With their vision “To honor God by serving and caring for the elderly”, I was suddenly reminded of my lola’s experience. All she ever wanted was to walk, and it’s a simple blessing that I’m sure almost all of us don’t even appreciate. Giving canes to the elderly will help them reach that simple goal again, which is to walk normally.

I admit that when my groupmate suggested Handog Tungkod Project as our CSR activity, I was not really excited about it at first. I was looking forward to teaching financial literacy to children in the most rural places since teaching is my passion, especially in the field of finance. But due to schedule, resource, and location constraints, we were not able to push through. But after realizing the value of the project’s intent to the elderly, and relating it with my grandmother’s experience, I suddenly got excited about the activity. I hope our service to the elderly in November will not only help them walk, but also give them a positive outlook in life.

 

The Means Against The End

 

Out of all the ethical frameworks discussed the ones that struck me the most is utilitarianism vs. Kantianism. Kantian ethics is considered to be deontological in that it holds that at action is right in and of itself without appeal to consequences. Utilitarianism bases its understanding of right action on consequences. For Kant, lying is simply wrong because of the practical reason that it’s simply wrong, without any appeal to consequences. For John Stuart Mill, lying is ok as long as it creates more happiness and the least pain, for the greatest number of people affected by that action.

This got me thinking not only about business ethics but also the practical things in life. Even before learning Kantianism and Utilitarianism, in my mind I already had this “philosophical arguments” right after watching Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Captain America’s objective was to hijack Hydra’s developed data-mining algorithm that can identify and kill individuals who might become future threats to Hydra’s plans. That, and of course, to save the world. From Hydra’s point of view, it simply is practical since they have the ability to prevent and eliminate current and future threats against the organization. Even innocent children will be killed as long as the algorithm, “Project Insight”, has detected a behavioral pattern that can threaten Hydra. Project Insight in itself is already at the extreme side of utilitarianism since their priority is to protect the organization at all costs, even killing the lives of the innocent. We all know that it’s fictional, but what if utilitarianism abounds everywhere in the world? If a man got caught from stealing a cellphone, will it be for the greater good if we just eliminate that person instead to avoid future thefts? Will we be in a better situation if people who committed and have a potential to commit crime are all eradicated to prevent further wrongdoings and ultimately create more happiness to the world?

 

I’m glad our justice system doesn’t work and think that way. We all have our duties, and we have a stringent requirement we’re bound to obey even if the consequences are not the best. This is why we’re not only bound to make our decisions based on utilitarianism and kantianism alone. Justice and fairness, rights, care, and virtue are other principles in ethics that should also be taken into consideration in order to consider a comparative treatment to others, and how our moral character can contribute (or obstruct) human lives.