Exploitation of Humanity by Advertisers for Commercial Advantage - Essay Example

Exploitation of Humanity by Advertisers for Commercial Advantage Student: Institutional Affiliation: Date: Exploitation of Humanity by Advertisers for Commercial Advantage Advertising has played a very critical role in the growth of capitalism by aiding commerce, enhancing brand visibility and sustaining the growth of multinational companies. Advertising is the use of media technologies, artistic skills and recently psychological knowledge to appeal to the target market. The ultimate aim of advertising campaigns is to get consumers to buy particular products and services to support the growth of the producing companies. The logic behind advertising is that the effective an advertising campaign is, the higher the value of projected sales. While an increase in sales and growth of an enterprise is good for any economy, there is a thin line between the growth of businesses and exploitation of masses through advertising. Critics of advertising argue that advertisers employ artistic and scientific skills to capture the attention of the target market and influence it to buy the advertised product or service. This has led to unsustainable consumerism where people buy more than they require for their needs. Advertisers also design campaigns meant to influence children whose cognitive ability if not fully developed. Advertising also contributes to gender stereotyping by objectifying women as sexual objects in advertisements that rely on sexual appeal to attract attention. Some messages in advertisement campaigns may be cleverly misleading and may thus cause injury or unexpected expenses to an unsuspecting consumer. Advertising clutter sent via email, visible on WebPages and public places constitute an incursion the attention of the audience subconsciously. The numerous negative implications of advertising seem to support Raymond Williams that at one level, 'the advertisers are people using certain skills and knowledge, created by real art and science, against the public for commercial advantage'. This paper will discuss the negative implications of commercially exploitive advertising in society. Advertising to children Children were not as significantly exposed to advertisement messages before the 1950’s as they are currently. This can be explained by the widespread consumption of television and internet entertainment. According to a news articles by Bruce Watson in The Guardian, The average consumption of TV commercials in countries such as America is estimated at 16,000 (Watson, 2014). It is such statistics that have contributed to debate and scientific research on the effects of advertising on a child’s brain. Several arguments have been advanced against advertising to children. For instance, advertising has been partly blamed for the rising cases of childhood obesity in developed countries. Fast-food restaurants, sugary foods processors and retailers, and carbonated drinks manufacturers have been blamed of contributing to childhood obesity by advertising to children. This has led to fast-food restaurants such as Subway to launch healthy eating marketing campaigns meant to appeal to children and avoid a social backlash from the markets where it operates. In 2014, Subway agreed to spend $41m in a campaign-“Playtime: Powered by Veggies” to promote healthy eating in children. Subway’s action is a reaction to a widely discussed ethical marketing issue relating to advertising to children (Watson, 2014). Psychologists argue that children below the age of five years do not have the ability to distinguish between entertainment and commercials in television programs. Children between seven and eight years can distinguish between and entertainment and commercials but cannot recognise the persuasive intent of advertisers. It is not clearly evident if children can appreciate the fact that advertisement messages can be inherently biased towards encouraging consumption of a certain product or service [Ame04]. The fact that the cognitive ability of children does not enable them to understand advertisements messages from a realistic perspective creates the ethical dilemma of whether to support advertisements to children or not. Advertising to children indirectly contributes to childhood obesity, poor impulse controls and inability to distinguish between products by their actual value and brands. Advertisers have consistently argued that advertising can help children to develop critical analysis of issues relating to their worldview. However, it is only fair to appreciate that advertisers are primarily interested in persuading children to purchase their services and products. Countries such as Sweden have laws that completely bar advertising to children below 12 years [Pri10]. From a cognitive development of children perspective, it is clear that children cannot appreciate the persuasive intent of the advertiser. Therefore, advertising to children is the use of science and art against public good for commercial advantage. Deceptive advertising Advertising is meant to get the attention of the audience for the ultimate purpose of getting them to buy the product or service in the ad [Kim14]. However, the information being passed on to consumers in advertisement is in some cases not verifiable. This means the consumer may be led to believe that they stand to gain certain benefits by an ad and end up not getting them upon purchase. Such misrepresentation of facts or deliberate deception may lead to financial losses and frustration to consumers. While there are clear laws guiding advertising in most countries, incidences of misleading advertising are not entirely nonexistent. In some cases, companies avoid costly penalties by relying technicalities such as the arrangement of words or their ambiguity [Kim14]. The industry regulators such as Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) and the Advertising Standards Bureau (ASB) in Australia regularly draft regulations to limit the public’s exposure to advertisements that may mislead them. However, cleverly concealed messages in advertisement such as false discounts after a price hike may not be easily identifiable. In most cases, consumers result to suing businesses in courts due to losses suffered from false advertisements. Such legal actions may be costly and time-consuming for most consumers and hence relatively ineffective in addressing the problem of false advertising. In the recent past, food products and cosmetics have been criticized and in some cases penalized for including misleading information in packaging and in advertisement messages. In 2009, Coca-Cola was penalised by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) for publishing misleading advertisements that seemed to purport that Coca-Cola cannot lead to weight gain, tooth decay. The advertisement also claimed that Coca-Cola does not contained significant amounts of caffeine. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) argued that the advertisement would lead a parent to include Coca-Cola in a family diet without regard to its potential health effects [Aus09]. Clearly, consumers are not comprehensively protected from misleading product information by advertisers despite the existence of strict laws and regulations. In some cases, advertisements conceal the real dangers of consuming products that have adverse health effects on humans. This means that advertisements contribute to commercial exploitation of the masses through media technology and art meant for societal development. Promotion of Consumerism The original intent of advertising campaigns was to create awareness relating to a product or service [Eri11]. However, with time, advertising has evolved into a clever art and science of persuading people to buy a product. The growth of advertising has been a key pillar of capitalism and the western world culture of luxurious or even unnecessary spending [McD13]. According to Heath (2012), modern advertising is modelled in such a way that it integrates psychological considerations that focus the target market on consuming the product. Apple Inc has successfully combined science and art to create high-impact advertisement and promotional campaigns for its Apple devices. Apple has over the years curved out a loyal customer base that is always eager to acquire its latest devices. The long queues of people waiting to buy new-release apple devices outside its stores is a clear testament of a strategic marketing and advertising campaign that focuses on portraying the brand as prestigious and different from the rest in the market. Due to the successful marketing campaign, apple is able to charge premium prices for its devices. Apple is regularly criticised for exploiting its customer base [Fra15]. Consumption of secondary needs items such as five-star hotel services, high-end smartphones, and fashion labels is an attempt by humanity to identify with a certain class. This means consumption gives humans a sense of identity or belonging [Rob12]. This is particularly the case in most developed countries where one is defined by what they consume. Advertising in most cases is designed to create the desire to consume in people by aiding them in creating unnecessary needs that may not be categorised as basic. This explains why advertisements are focused on humanly desires such as happiness, love, self-actualisation and not the products benefits [McD13]. For example, Coca-Cola’s “Taste the Feeling” advertisement campaign focuses on feeling such as happiness, fun and love to persuade the target market to drink its Coca-Cola beverage [Isi16]. The beverage cannot in itself trigger such benefits as happiness in the people who take it. Advertising merely reinforces the psychological need of fulfilment as depicted by an ad message and makes one to feel incomplete without having the advertised product or service. Use of sexual appeal and objectification of women The use of sexual appeal to promote brands or consumption of products and services is an effective advertising strategy that has immensely benefited some brands particularly in the 20th century [Rei13]. The widespread use of the phrase “Sex Sells” certainly confirms the observation that sex has been a major component of advertisers’ messages in advertisements over the years. However, this strategy has received intense criticism from religious and government institutions to the extent that in most countries, there are laws and regulations in place to moderate the use of sex or sexual appeal to promote products via media channels [The13]. From a religious perspective, the idea of using sex in advertisements is obscene and an infringement on family values that religion strives to protect. Therefore, it is wrong for advertisers to use messages, images or motion pictures that rely on sex to promote products/services (Pontifical Council for Social Communications, 1997). Unlike in most western countries, mostly religious markets such as Middle East have strict laws and regulations meant to restrict the use of sex or depiction of women’s physique in advertising. The use of sex in advertising is not only criticised on social values violation grounds but also from a feminist perspective. According to the overriding views in feminist activists’ arguments, it is mostly the images of women that feature prominently in advertisements that use sex to promote products/services. Reichert & Lambiase (2013) argues that the prominence of women in ads that use sexual appeal to promote brands contributes to a social contention that regards women as sexual objects designed to pleasure men. The depiction of women in such ads also supports the notion that women are less sexually and socially powerful and should thus be viewed as objects of men’s desire. Some brands such as Axe Body Spray also use men’s images designed to trigger a sexual appeal to the product. However, proponents of the use of sex in ads argue that sex is a natural and genuine human desire that advertisers only use to grab the attention of the audience [The13]. The widespread use of sexual appeal and objectification of women in advertisements is a clear use of art and science by advertisers against public for commercial interests. The public has the right to be protected from images and messages that undermine social and religious values related to sexuality and gender equality. Large-scale attention exploitation Attention is basically the most valuable commodity that advertising agents sells to advertisers. As noted by Matthew Crawford in the book “The World Beyond Your Head”, the prices of advertising services are priced based on the scale and intensity of attention that a media is likely to exploit within a target market. Crawford (2015) notes that advertising has taken up a huge percentage of visual public and sometimes private space in airports, websites, social media networks, buildings and public utility facilities to encourage consumption of certain goods or services. Crawford (2015), notes that such large-scale advertising is an incursion into people’s attention without their consent. While one might argue that the public can freely choose what distracts them, it is important to note that advertising is a combination of art and science designed to gain people’s attention subconsciously. Plessis (2011) argues that in the process of avoiding advertisements, people actually give attention to advertisements, a process Plessis (2011) labelled ‘inadvertent attention’. The choice of colour and speed of motion in video adverts or graphics in still images appeals to the very nature of our brain anatomy that is naturally attracted to such aspects in the environment. Therefore, it is evidently not logical to sustain the argument that humans can choose to ignore advertisement. The advertising industry has over the years invested heavily in terms of media and public policy influence to the extent that people in most parts of the world have little or no influence on the scale of advertising clutter that they consume without their consent. According to Crawford (2015), attention should be regarded as a limited resource just like clean water or unpolluted environment. There should be laws to protect humanity from having its attention exploited for commercial purposes. If one approaches advertising from Crawford (2015) contention, it is possible to claim that advertising agents should pay consumers for exploiting their attention without their consent. However, since it is not possible to quantify attention exploitation by advertising agents, it is difficult to develop a model that can be used to compensate advertisements consumers for their attention. Therefore, the exploitation of attention should be regulated by laws or methodologies designed to protect the consumer from advertisers. It is worthy to note that some players in the media industry such as internet browsers have taken the step of reducing advertisers clutter to users by giving consumers an option of seeing or playing ads on the browser. However, some consumers who pay higher for services and products have the luxury of not being cluttered with advertisements in airport lounges and smartphones apps. This means that the advertising industry is somewhat creating a system of economic/social discrimination [McD13]. Clearly, advertising has successfully exploited human attention for commercial purposes without compensating the affected individuals or giving them the opportunity to decide whether or not to consume such content. Conclusion From the literature analysed thus far, it is clearly evident that the sole purpose of advertising is to commercially benefit the advertiser and the advertising agent. It is only on a limited scale do advertisers intend to pass on information that will only benefit the consumer. Advertising to children has helped clothing, gaming and fast-food brands increase their sales significantly. However, such advertising exploits the relatively less developed cognitive ability in children. Misleading information relating to products safety and benefits also contribute to growth in sales but exposes consumers to injury. Advertising has also helped shape the unsustainable consumerism culture mainly in the western world by encouraging spending on unnecessary goods and services. The objectification of women in advertisements and use of sexual appeal is another negative consequence of advertising. While advertising has contributed significantly to economic growth and emergence of high-value brands,, it has also led to massive exploitation of society to commercially benefit advertisers. Therefore, it is fair to conclude that Raymond Williams is right to contend that ‘the advertisers are people using certain skills and knowledge, created by real art and science, against the public for commercial advantage'. References Ame04: , (American Psychological Association, 2004), Pri10: , (Priya, 2010), Kim14: , (Kim & Wadhwa, 2014), Aus09: , (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), 2009), Eri11: , (Plessis, 2011), McD13: , (McDonald & Wearing, 2013), Fra15: , (Frank, 2015), Rob12: , (Heath, 2012), Isi16: , (Isidore, 2016), Rei13: , (Reichert & Lambiase, 2013), The13: , (Theodoridis, Kyrousi, & Panigyrakis, 2013), Read More