Principles of Marketing: A Report on Advertising Ethics Evolution

This report examines the evolution of advertising ethics, focusing on advertisements from the 1940s and 1950s that would be considered unethical today. It highlights examples such as tobacco advertisements that falsely promoted health benefits by using doctors' endorsements, and Coca-Cola's advertisements that promoted unhealthy dieting practices. The report explains how advertising has evolved, attributing the changes to the evolution of mass media and the implementation of constitutional laws. The paper concludes that while unethical advertisements were prevalent in the past, increased awareness and stricter regulations have led to the development of more ethical and socially responsible advertising practices. The report provides references to support the analysis.

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Principles of marketing management
PRINCIPLES OF MARKETING MANAGEMENT
Ethics in advertising
JULY 22, 2019
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Principles of amrketing management
Ethics in advertising
Advertisements from the 1940's or 1950's which would not be considered ethical today
In the advertisements, ethics plays a very crucial role by relating the purpose of advertising and
the nature of advertising with the ethics of peoples in the ethical aspects of their health and social
concern. During 1940s and 1950s, there were some advertisements that were ethically wrong and
ethically not accepted nowadays. The examples of these unethical advertisements are the
advertisement of tobacco as promoting health, and advertisements of Coca Cola. In the
advertising of tobacco, they used the profession of doctors and showed that many of doctors used
tobacco in their daily life to stay healthy. In the advertisement, they showed that they performed
a survey with professional doctors and asked them that what cigarette do they smoked and which
brand they used to smoke cigarette. By using the survey, they open up about the Camels costlier
tobaccos brand name in their advertisement. They had used the name of T-zone for the taste and
throat to suit camels for a person. By the use of survey, they showed that doctor’s preference was
Camels to stay healthy and to perform their duty towards their patients and society (Jackler &
Ayoub, 2018). While smoking tobacco is injurious for health. It causes many hazardous illnesses
to the peoples such as cancer, lungs diseases like COPD, heart and kidney diseases (Kitts, 2019).
Similarly, in the advertisement of the Coca Cola, they had used Karl Langerfeld a fashion
designer for their advertising. During the advertisement, Karl Langerfeld had claimed that to lose
80 pounds on a diet major attribution would went to diet coke used by him. He claimed to drink
all the day to maintain his fitness nothing else. It was a wrong message for all the women who
wanted to maintain their fitness. This advertising was showing that dieting is conventional and
for this the better way to maintain thin and attractive body diet coke was the better option
(Roose, et al., 2018).

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Principles of amrketing management
Explanation how advertising has evolved since then and what factors have influenced this
change
Advertising evolution has been considered with the evolution of mass media and laws situated by
constitution of the country. When the television came into the market, only few networks were
there that were provided to the peoples which show public broadcasting and few local
independent stations. By the use of this channel, advertisement has been reached to the wide
community of the peoples. After that when evolution in the mass media increased and use of
these mass media such as television, radio, Facebook, You Tube and twitter was increase than
the evolution in the advertisements also was increased (Leisis, et al., 2018). Similarly,
constitutional laws provided some rules to the advertising company that only those
advertisements would be published to the mass media that would be ethically right and would
provide benefits to the community of the peoples. After that, only those advertisements would
started taken place on the mass media that were in the benefits of the community of peoples
ethically (Aiken, et al., 2018).
From the above discussion, I have concluded that during the 1940s and 1950s, many unethical
advertisement were published that may cause harmful effect to the peoples. However, nowadays,
by the use of awareness of constitutional laws and positive mass media use advertisement in the
benefits of society has been evolve effectively.

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Principles of amrketing management
References
Aiken, A. et al., 2018. Youth perceptions of alcohol advertising: are current advertising
regulations working?. Australia and New Zealan Journall of Public Health, 42(3).
Jackler, R. K. & Ayoub, N. F., 2018. ‘Addressed to you not as a smoker… but as a doctor’:
doctor‐targeted cigarette advertisements in JAMA. Addiction, 113(7), pp. 1345-1363.
Kitts, A. K. B., 2019. The Patient Perspective on Lung Cancer Screening and Health Disparities.
Journal of the American College of Radiology, April, 16(4), pp. 601-606.
Leisis, W. et al., 2018. Social Communication in Advertising: Consumption in the Mediated
Marketplace. 4th ed. New York: Routledge.
Roose, G., Geuens, M. & Vermeir, I., 2018. From informational towards transformational
advertising strategies? A content analysis of Belgian food magazine advertisements. British Food
Journal, 120(6), pp. 1170-1182.