Abstract
Social media users have increased to 3.5 billion including children users. Social media affects children as well. Although children's rights are protected by United Nations Convention, and advertising addressing children is not ethical, the embedded, integrated advertising in social media is more difficult for children due to their lack of advertising literacy because it is much easier to differentiate advertising in traditional methods compared to digital advertising via social media, where social media integrated advertising is used. This study aims to clarify social media and ethics concepts and how social media advertisements affect children in the digital era.
TopMarketing ethics is a systematic work for standard marketing decisions, behavior and how these decisions and behavior are applied to institutions (Laczniak & Murphy, 1993). It has two different fields normative and value focused philosophy and positive and descriptive usually ampiric social sciences. Both dimensions are necessary for ethic marketing application to improve ethic marketing practice. The normative and descriptive difference can be defined as positive ethics which based on observation and data and usually explains what happened on moral based situations. Normative ethics focuses on a specific standard where can be applied and reasoning and at the same time describing the reasons why to continue with such an ideal. At the same time normative ethics, like positivism methods, when applied to marketing issues, it is a part of written analytic process, and it is not related to like sayings “customers are always right” etc. (Smith, 2001).
Current marketing groups have scientific discussions covering ethics including normative ethics, like what should normative ethics be and positive ethics like what can be done or what could positive ethics be), consumer ethics like which morel rules could guide the consumers and virtue ethic like what is ethics approach (Murphy et al., 2007).
Internet marketing has two-way communication comparing to one-way communication traditional marketing therefore it has different ethic and privacy issues (Malhotra et al., 2004). Researches related about marketing based on private characteristics tried to find out how they had ethical decisions (Singhapakdi et al., 1996). For example, Hunt and Vittell (2006), claim that people reply differently to ethical questions or situations depending on their ethic sensitivity.
Tuten and Solomon has defined social media marketing as an organization to use social media technologies, channels and softwares to communicate, to present and to exchange offers for their stake holders (Tuten and Solomon, 2017).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Information and Communication Technology (ICT): It is similar to Information Technology (IT), but mainly focuses on communication via wireless network, cell phones, internet and other ways of instant communication websites like video conferencing (zoom), Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp which enable online real time, instant communication.
Social media: The online network where users or businesses publish their own content is defined as social media.
Influencer: Influencers unlike Vlogger or Youtuber, produces content and reaches a wide audience. Influencer is the person who can change and affect the behavior of people in new media.
Influencers Marketing: With Influencers, a new marketing concept of “Influencer marketing” has emerged with Influencers.
YouTuber: YouTube is the world's largest video sharing website. Youtubers, who share their videos on YouTube with their followers earn revenue from YouTube and through many other promotions and advertisements such as sponsored content, promotion of brands, promotion of products and applications.
Vlogger: Abbreviation for the word “Video-logger”. Vloggers are the people who record, produce, and create videos. Vloggers create mostly conceptual content. Vlogger is the video version of “blogger.”