High competence will always equal low public trust when it comes to ad execs, but ethical standards need to be a company measure
Building on Adam Ferrier’s opinion piece published in Mumbrella last week, marketing consultant Rob Farmer says company-by-company, rather than industry consensus, is the only way to address the ethical questions Ferrier raised that go further than the law.
Perhaps foolishly, if people did avoid reading Adam Ferrier’s piece last week, ‘The ethics of advertising: Chances are you won’t read this,’ I’m going to build on it.
The premise was that behaviour-change ad folk don’t like dwelling on the ethics of their effects. (System 2 thinking really is avoided by everyone.) Gallup’s latest (US) public trust results are in and they’re not pretty for ad practitioners. The piece ended with a bit of branded content for Thinkerbell’s new ethics program. Fair enough. I think company-by-company is the way to address ethical questions that go further than the law.
Because measuring progress at the industry level with public trust surveys is pointless. The ad practitioner score is always going to be terrible. (Ad execs are also towards the bottom of the UK’s Veracity Index, and were rock bottom when first added in 2018.) The underlying reason, I believe, is the ‘loss aversion’ bias.
If the pain of losing is psychologically twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining, then an ad exec’s core competency represents a powerful threat to acts of free will. People don’t like the idea of losing control to strangers trying to make them buy this, use that, or pay more for these. It’s something that happens to other people, not them.
Not sure what that article even said or the comment above. So many words. But all I can add is, is you want trust, get a dog. If you want the truth, get a cat.
Not sure this adds anything substantive to the subject.
We are not thoughtless automatons. Everyone uses System 2 actively, just not so much when impulse action is enabled and encouraged.
Right now I would suggest many, many people are tapping into System 2 to help them understand and navigate the factors negatively impacting their lives – rising rents for example, or shrinking purchasing power more broadly.
How they might respond is to default to the cheapest buy. But this too is fraught, bringing into focus the consumer rights vs citizen rights argument. Is the cheapest possible alternative really best when it guts our domestic manufacturing base?
Your use of loss aversion here misinterprets the bias. I’d suggest you read up on locus of control, perceived or otherwise.
Behaviouralists have long been grappling with the term (or accusation) of libertarian paternalism. Free agency is a central tenet of democratic societies. If someone wants to smoke cigarettes and suffer the adverse health effects, then let them.
That argument might then move to secondary effects, such as passive smoking. I’d venture many, many more people suffer from the secondary effect of violence due to excessive drinking than those getting cancer from someone else’s cigarette.
In this scheme of things, the impact of socially acceptable alcohol is significantly worse than socially unacceptable smoking.
Which agency in their right mind is going to tell an alcohol client they need to address this unwanted imposition (for want of a better term) on the lives of others?
Which agency is going to refuse a highly-remunerative tech client because their AI product is being used to create porn images of underage children?
As for your last paragraph, I’m still trying to figure out what you mean.
The interconnectedness of ad agency and client is underlined by the foremost dogma of capitalism – that a business must maximise profits. If your conscience is troubling you in this regard, then leave. If you want trust, get a dog.