Up in Ontario

Moral Myopia in Advertising

I came across an interesting article today in an unusual place, The Baptist Standard. The article focused on a study conducted by a University of Texas professor that found "many advertising executives fail to see any ethical implications of their work, and if they do see moral problems, they refuse to talk about them."

Professor Meme Drumwright, associate professor of advertising at University of Texas at Austin, and Patrick Murphy, a marketing professor at the University of Notre Dame, interviewed more than 50 advertising practitioners at 29 agencies in eight cities to discover how they perceive ethical issues. They collected their results into a paper and concluded that they were dealing with an industry characterized by the alliterative twins, "moral myopia" — a distorted moral vision that keeps ethical issues from coming into focus — and "moral muteness" — an unwillingness to talk about moral concerns.

Now, I'm not usually a fan of media outlets whose missions statements include references to the almighty, but this article piqued my curiousity and didn't offend me on the sanctimonious or righteousness scales. In fact, religion isn't even introduced in the article until the end, where its tacked on (professor Drumwright tells us that "there is a huge role for the church to play"), which serves the same function as a boilerplate to the piece, similar to an About the Company section to round out a press release.

From my experience, the findings of the report seem to be perfectly in line with the purpose of advertising. If anyone in the industry stopped to think about what they were doing and its consequences the industry would come to a standstill. Basically the ad industry exists to sell all of us more/new/different crap that we don't need. It treats humans as abstract targets and tries to trigger a response in them (BUY!) by any means necessary. It manipulates individuals in groups for commercial gain.

So the results of the study do not surprise me. Why would anyone want to consider the ethical implications of the latest campaign to sell more Ford pickups, new AquaFresh toothpaste or a multipack of Kleenex tissues? Some of the brightest minds of the past few generations have devoted themselves to finding new ways to make people buy, and so we have bought in ever-increasing amounts. This is our defining and unifying experience as a culture: consumerism. But the consequences are never part of the pitch.

To get to the heart of the matter, the article from The Baptist Standard reinforces and validates with academic credentials something that I have thought and felt for a long time. Working in advertising stinks and is amoral to being with. Its basic purpose is dehumanizing and demoralizing. People working in advertising are some of the most voracious consumers to be found anywhere. They spend so much time and effort selling things to others that they sell themselves at the same time: on the products, on the consumption, on the lifestyle. They hear the stories in the advertisements so often that the narrative becomes overwhelming, consumer stories end up as the first ones that we are able to tell.

I know the symptoms of amorality and the circumstances of compartmentalization because I work in marketing and advertising. Being a writer only rarely pays the bills. With a writer's skills, what else can you do? Sit on the boardwalk and toss off limericks to lovers strolling by, like a busking bard? To make sure that life in the big city continues I have worked for the past few years in the marketing of different products and services such as vacation travel, banking, pharmaceuticals. And from my experience, to consider the value of your work or its consequences is to depress yourself. No matter how I have pretied up my job by title or motivation or with co-workers, the sense of being an intellectual prostitute, a shill, a creative mind for hire, a communicator to act as the conduit for any message has never gone away.

Am I being too harsh? Too much Adbusters in undergrad? We all need to make a living, after all. Life is full of contradictory points of view to reconcile. I'm not too precious that I shouldn't have to work. I just wish I knew of a better way to make it work.