Advertising Ethics in the Social Media Age

Introduction

Advertising has drawn criticism for a wide range of ills from misleading claims to the encouragement of undesirable attitudes. While some of the barrage of criticism leveled at advertising appears to be unfounded, even a brief perusal of the titles of the books and articles on the subject of advertising is enough to show the skepticism with which public opinion regards advertising: “What’s wrong with advertising?” reads the title of a chapter in Ogilvy on Advertising (Ogilvy, 1983/1999, p. 206). “Advertising – Is this the sort of job that an honest man can take pride in?” asks another title (Corlett, 1967, as cited in Corlett, 1985). The authors – both of them advertising professionals – both offer responses to criticisms of advertising, but the titles nonetheless reveal recognition of what appears to be the prevailing public sentiment about advertising. The subject of advertising ethics is so fraught with controversy as to prompt a scholar to ask: “Advertising ethics – the ultimate oxymoron?” (Beltramini, 2003). In fact, Beltramini has pointed out that the reason why advertising ethics “has sustained itself as a towering lightning rod for controversy, at times singularly and fully credited with the demise of professional business practices, and the rise of underhanded and unprofessional commercialism” might be because it is the “most visible business tool” (2003, p. 215).

Advertising’s unintended social and cultural consequences have been the subject of much debate (see, for example, Pollay, 1986, and Holbrook, 1987, in response). While the discussion of these important arguments is beyond the scope of this chapter, they are nonetheless included to provide a broader framework for the discussion of advertising ethics and social media.

Advertising in digital media in general, and the social media in particular, has added ethical concerns of its own to the discussion of advertising ethics, which was already suffering under a cloud of suspicion. In fact, as Lane, King, and Russell (2009) have noted, advertising content that would be “ill-advised” in general-circulation media paradoxically finds its way to a narrowly focused venue such as the Internet (p. 759).

An issue that has come to be of increasing concern to consumers with the development of sophisticated communication technology and growing use of Internet marketing is privacy (e.g., Fill, 2009, p. 112; Lane, King, & Russell, 2009, p. 757; Ashworth and Free, 2006; Rapp, Hill, Gaines, & Wilson, 2009). Some even claim that privacy rights will be to the twenty-first century what civil rights and women’s equality were to the twentieth, as cited by Laczniak and Murphy (2006b, p. 315). In a section on Internet marketing, Clow and Baack (2010) include the issues of spam advertising, using cookies to track consumer Web browsing, and interstitial advertising that intrudes upon a person on the Internet without warning (p. 421).

This chapter will provide an overview of advertising ethics, address the ethical issues raised by social media advertising and try to suggest some guidelines for their resolution.