The Lowest Moment in Advertising - Essay Example

While motion picture companies all over the world use this advertising tool to advertize the favorable reviews their movies received, Sony Pictures went ahead of the game. They invented their own critic by the name of David Manning and under this name wrote fake favorable reviews for not just the Knight’s Tale but also for Hollow Man, The Animal, The Patriot and the Vertical Limit (Lawrence and Webber, 2010). Sony Pictures Entertainment Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE), formerly known as Columbia Pictures Entertainment was found in 1987 in California.

SPE is subsidiary of Sony Corporation of America. Sony Corporation of America is further a subsidiary of Sony Corporation based in Tokyo, Japan. This multinational media conglomerate produces and also distributes motion pictures and television serials. SPE is one of the biggest media and technology conglomerates that provide entertainment in the form of movies, television, and technology to more than 140 countries around the world. It reported total revenue of more than seven billion in 2010 (Sony Pictures, 2011).

Where Sony failed With an organization as big and as established as Sony Pictures, this kind of advertising was not expected. The use of David Manning in numerous such advertising projects led Sony Pictures to incur a fine of 1.5 million pounds (BBC News, 2005). While Sony Pictures can easily recover from the financial aspect of the situation, it is the resulting brand value that creates challenges for the company. This particular advertising approach has affected Sony Pictures on different scales and aspects.

Social, Ethical, Regulation aspects  Advertising has quickly become one of the five largest industries of the world. We are constantly exposed to advertising. Even when we do not realize it, advertising moulds our lives in such a manner that we are being constantly hypnotized with it. This has raised concerns among various critics who demanded the need for regulatory practices on advertising. The government was forced to take notice to protect the interest of the consumers against false advertising.

However, even when the government has posed sanctions on certain types of advertising, social and ethical issues still arise which are outside the boundaries of these laws and here companies must take on their corporate social responsibility to ensure good practices. On the social level, advertising interacts with the consumers to educate them, create a feeling of happiness and generally improve on the standards of living (O’Guinn, Allen and Semenik, 2008). However, the use of David Manning’s review created the opposite effect.

It misled the consumers through wrong information and those who went to watch the movie based on the review did not receive the level of satisfaction that they expected from a movie that was favorably liked by a critic. From an ethical stand point, advertising is supposed to be honest, fair and sensitive. Even if we often assume creative license to sell products through advertising, ethically we are required to ensure that the advertising is not deceiving. The use of David Manning was particularly deceiving since no such review was written and no such critic even existed at The Ridgefield Press.

Such practices in advertising are called deceptive