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The Ethics of Advertising
| Article
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17189 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1990 |
4,570 Words |
| Author
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Linda Benn
Linda Benn is a doctoral fellow in American studies at the
University of Maryland and a lecturer in the writing seminars
at the Johns Hopkins University. |
Last summer, NBC aired a provocatively titled news special called Sex, Buys, and Advertising. Hosted and cowritten by Deborah Norville, the program was, perhaps, the network's bid to prove that its beleaguered Today Show cost was more than just a beautiful figurehead. Sex, Buys, and Advertising promised a bitingly critical look at questionable business tactics within the advertising industry; indeed, Norville vowed early in the show to "dig beneath the glamour" of the ad world in order to discover its cost "to the very society we live in." Such a project, carefully executed, would certainly have proved her credibility as a reporter, since, despite advertising's ubiquitous presence in cotemporary culture, its inner workings have remained shielded from public scrutiny. Such scrutiny is more crucial than ever today, for even as advertisers are confronted with the greatest barrage of negative criticism since the early 1970s, they have demonstrated a distinct unwillingness to reconsider the ethics of their profession.
The measure of advertising's power may be taken by the very way the media present that criticism. For example, Norville's program did touch on a number of controversial issues that have drawn complaints about the advertising industry from consumer groups, parents, and legislators: target marketing of cigarettes and alcohol to minorities, aggressive and dangerous new advertising strategies aimed at children, false claims in numerous ads for "environmentally safe" products. But though the show briefly paraded these and other issues before us, it did so in a way that was nearly indistinguishable form the ads themselves.
Attended by a pounding rock score - as in countless ads - calculated to make the pulse race, the images flashed before the viewer in dizzying, rapid-cut succession, making it almost impossible to pay attention to the accompanying voice-over, whether the words were critical or not. Those images, too, were culled from ads, so that Sex, Buys, and Advertising managed to give airtime to more sponsors than one might see in a whole day of TV viewing. After one particularly long and seemingly irrelevant segment about the making of Pepsi's latest ad, "A Night at the Opera," starring Michael J. Fox, the program broke for a commercial. What appeared on the Screen? Pepsi's "A Night at the Opera," starring Michael J. Fox.
Given such "impartial" sponsorship, it is little wonder that, having "dug beneath the glamour," Norville found only more glamour to uncover: witty young executives battling dramatically for clients, polished spokespeople earnestly defending their profession, celebrities and supermodels like
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