Business Ethics Advertising - Essay Example

Since advertizing is done to persuade, it needs to be very creative and original to make an impact. There are often catchy tag lines associated with the products so that anyone who sees it also learns it and spreads the word. Advertising agencies are usually hired by companies to come up with eye-catching and very influencing advertisements. In the race of winning from other agencies, the advertisements that are proposed these days, lack what are known as advertising ethics. It is very important to have a check on all advertisements that are played on media to be sufficiently ethical since media has a very strong influence on the viewers and lots of harm can be done if the wrong things are promoted in the wrong way.

Advertisements are made to influence the probable customers to buying a good or service. To do so, advertisements play on emotions targeting the audience so that the customers believe that the purchase of the good will benefit them (Phillips, 1997). The advertisements create a scenario such that it increases a customer’s emotional state and the customer feels that his life would be better once he purchases the product. For this reason, advertisements are often fanaticizing. The ethics that must be considered when coming up with an advertisement includes most importantly giving honest and useful information to the probable customers instead of misguiding them by fanaticizing the product beyond reality.

Also, it’s a common trend these days to let celebrities promote a product through advertisements. That is unethical if the celebrities do not use the product themselves, which in most cases they don’t. The celebrities just use their star power to influence customers to buy a product which may not be as glamorous as the celebrities themselves. Also, aggressive advertising is unethical. Surely, advertisements are made to attract customers towards the good but they should not