Randal Marlin

by Propaganda

  Beverage Advertising Initiative. ASC’s 2011 Compliance Report describes the details

  of this initiative, and anyone can find therein just what the different participating

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  companies have undertaken to do in accordance with the agreed principles.12 It will be interesting to see how this initiative turns out in the years to come. Undoubtedly

  public pressure will be vitally important to its success. The public are also consumers,

  and companies with a reputation for unethical advertising practices may suffer from

  loss of customers.

  We will have more to say about the relative merits of ASC compared with more

  stringent legal controls in Chapter 7.

  The Dependency Effect

  In the literature on advertising, much has been written about the so-called dependency

  effect in advertising. Derived from the work of economist John Kenneth Galbraith13

  the expression draws attention to the propensity of some advertising to create wants

  rather than to satisfy existing wants. Creating wants is not always bad, since new prod-

  ucts may need to have their useful properties made known before people will want

  to buy them. The computer is a good example. Many asked, “who needs it?” when it

  first came out. Now, its benefits are recognized as enormous (although it also brings

  drawbacks!). For example, all kinds of academic articles are available online, saving the

  scholar many hours of bibliographic searching. Thus, there is no reason to object to

  advertisers creating new wants.

  The legitimate objection captured by the expression “dependency effect,” however,

  refers to the situation in which advertisers create wants such that the satisfaction of those wants leaves one no better off than before the wants were created. The net effect of the

  advertising is to get people to waste their money, buying things that give them no net

  value. Let us say that, before the advertising, the contentment level of the target audience

  was 10 units on whatever positive scale we choose. The advertising convinces the audi-

  ence that they are rather miserable specimens of humanity without the particular soap,

  perfume, food, medicine, clothing, car, etc. They are made to feel worse as a result of the

  advertising, so for a while their contentment is down to level 8. They spend money and

  buy the product, but end up at level 9 because the product delivers less than it promises.

  That is one version of the “dependency effect,” but there is a more insidious kind. In

  the case of cigarettes, addiction is created by the nicotine in tobacco. By creating and

  satisfying a want for the cigarette, a very long-lasting dependency can be created. As

  anyone who has smoked or knows someone who has smoked for a long period of time

  can testify, this dependency is fraught with cost, inconvenience, and health problems,

  which tend to outweigh the pleasure involved. There is a good case for asserting that the

  net effect from the advertising is negative for the targeted person who succumbs.

  False Belief and Real Happiness

  Given that we live in society and that advertising is a mass phenomenon, it can hap-

  pen that advertising a spurious product gives rise to real wants. If enough people

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  believe that having a particular gemstone or model of car is an indication of status, then, the nature of status being what it is, it becomes true that having it gives status.14

  Purchasing the object gives the status-seeker exactly what is desired. Although the

  world has always had its share of status-seekers, status-seeking is an unworthy enter-

  prise, and anyone who can cash in and make a dol ar out of this propensity is welcome

  to do so. Analogous arguments might be made about the deceptions practiced by P.T.

  Barnum. People want to be fooled, they get pleasure out of illusions, so why not cater

  to this long-standing desire? Barnum devised many gimmicks for separating a sucker

  from his money. Once, he hired someone to place four bricks one by one at busy New

  York intersections. The man carried a fifth brick and methodically exchanged each

  of the bricks after a rapid march. Every hour he walked into Barnum’s Museum, and

  many people would pay to follow, hoping to solve the mystery of his odd movements.15

  However, there is a difference between raking off a bit of someone’s very disposable

  income for a bit of harmless foolery on the one hand and creating serious dependency

  on the other. Not everyone is immune to the social disapproval of others, even when the

  disapproval is on spurious grounds. The environmental, ecological, and other damages

  resulting from excessive consumption of goods are a major concern, yet they are encour-

  aged by the kind of advertising that links status with acquisition of the latest model this

  or that, leading to the junking of the old. The idea that only a diamond signifies the

  permanent commitment for a happy, lasting marriage can be a hardship to those who

  cannot manage the expense. At some point a line is crossed between innocent and fun-

  filled illusion-making and a contribution to serious social problems. To determine where

  that line is crossed would involve a case-by-case analysis that looks at the effects of both

  production and consumption of the advertised product along with the social repercus-

  sion of the attitudes and beliefs encouraged by the advertising messages.

  It should also be reckoned into the moral equation that most of us would be

  unhappy to learn that our happiness is founded on an illusion. In such a case, there

  is a standing possibility of exposure to the truth and with it the destruction of such

  happiness. Perhaps something even more fundamental is at stake here; recall Socrates’

  dictum that it is better to be a dissatisfied human than a satisfied pig. As long as we

  have aspirations to knowledge and truth, we cannot be satisfied with the happiness

  derived from illusions, even when the illusions are held by others. What we might do,

  though, as part of the search for truth, is to rank various forms of illusions from the

  dangerous to the relatively harmless and concentrate our energies on eradicating the

  dangerous kind.

  PUBLIC RELATIonS ETHICS

  In ancient Greece, the orator directly confronted an audience, and persuasive skills

  were directed at winning it over, along lines described in Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Today, CHAPTER 5: ADVERTISIng AnD PUBLIC REL ATIonS ETHICS 195

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  that kind of direct confrontation is relatively rare. For the most part, large-scale communication is mediated through print, radio, television, and, more recently, the

  Internet. Communication through the Internet can be direct, but it is not necessar-

  ily reciprocally so. A website can be visited by thousands who leave no immediately

  obvious indication of who they are and why they have visited, unless they choose

  to respond to requests for such identification. However, increasingly sophisticated

  analytical tools have been developed, and continue to be developed, to get all kinds of

  information about an Internet user, and it would be foolish to assume that one’s places
<
br />   of visitation and communication are private. What is difficult for an ordinary user may

  be simple for an experienced hacker. If the Internet has lessened the need for skilled

  public relations practitioners, this diminution is not reflected in the educational sys-

  tem in the United States, where the US Commission on Public Relations Education

  reported an increase from 26 to 75 graduate public relations programs between the

  years 2000 and 2011.16

  Public relations (PR) as a profession developed in the United States in the twen-

  tieth century largely in response to the growth of the large-scale corporation and the

  mass media. News reports damaging to private railways or power utilities, with con-

  sequent demands for government intervention, created a need for both some kind of

  “damage control” and, more importantly, some means of heading them off before they

  happened. From the very beginning, PR was a media-focused and media-conscious

  activity. Today it has become an accepted part of modern life. Partly because of this

  greater acceptance, but also perhaps because of increasing pressures from countercul-

  ture activists and other groups, PR firms have reached “a size and scope undreamed of

  in the 1980s.” The Commission on Public Relations Education refers to “the need for

  dialogue with groups of people who can and will influence [the] future [of ] virtually

  every kind of institution.”17

  The need for skilled handlers when the mass media are involved is obvious. A PR

  advisor will need to know what things will be treated as newsworthy by what vehicles

  of information dissemination and will need to be aware of deadlines in order to foster

  personal contact with key decision-makers, and so on. Yet, the Commission Report

  refers to “the veritable explosion of one-to-one communication and the technology

  to implement it,”18 without any indication that this would diminish the need for PR

  practitioners. Why? Perhaps one answer lies in the PR disasters that can occur when

  e-mail messages or faxes reach the wrong destination. Institutions need to be reminded

  of the potential damage that can arise from a keyboard slip. Apart from that, effective

  one-on-one communication still requires knowledge of the principles of rhetoric; if

  key executives talk with individual members of the public, they need to be coached

  on the respects in which honest statements, meant to convey only the truth, might be

  misinterpreted by the message recipient. Furthermore, a hostile message receiver will

  look for any phrase that can be taken out of context to damage the institution, so a PR

  consultant makes executives aware of the potential for damage in that respect.

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  At the core of the whole PR endeavour is the problem of ethics. It arises the moment we contemplate the possibility that the best interests of a particular institution, public or private, commercial or non-commercial, may not coincide with the

  best interests of the public generally. The mass media provides a check on institutional

  wrongdoing. It is a great triumph for journalism when some illegal scam is exposed

  by intrepid reporters and appropriate prosecutions and convictions result, leading to

  better, more honest institutional operations in the future. However, the institution,

  obviously, prefers that the matter be cleaned up from within rather than have all the

  bad publicity. From the very beginning, then, there is a complicated question: “which

  interests should predominate—those of the institution or those of the public gener-

  ally?” This question needs some refinement or contextualization. If we are speaking

  of philanthropic institutions, the public and institutional interests seem to mesh well,

  but for-profit institutions are not aiming at charity. They are looking, on the whole,

  for maximum profit for shareholders. Maybe the public interest is better served by

  reduced profits and lower priced products, but that is not the customary orientation of

  the for-profit mentality; shareholders have grounds for complaint, if not civil action,

  against directors who turn such a company into a charitable enterprise. In one sense,

  then, the answer is fairly obvious: the public interest is opposed to the private institu-

  tional interest. But again, the situation is not so simple. It can be argued that it works

  out in the long run to have private, for-profit companies put their interests above

  the public interest, because, or so it is claimed, the profit incentive is a much more

  powerful goad to human enterprise than a concern for public welfare, and everybody

  benefits from this in the long run.

  This is not the place to settle arguments about the relative virtues of socialism and

  capitalism. The experience of the last two centuries is that both systems have potential

  for abuses. The paradox for PR is that in so many situations the most beneficial image

  an institution has is one of maximum concern for the public interest, and yet the great-

  est need for PR advice comes when the interests of the institution and those of the

  public diverge. There is every good reason for practitioners to proclaim to the public

  that honesty, integrity, telling the truth, and credibility are essential components of

  good PR. This is largely true, but what is unsaid is that if any naive, ful , and unguarded

  disclosure of institutional policies and activities could be made without damage, there

  would hardly be any need for their services. We are in the realm of suppressio veri and suggestio falsi again. Despite the contents of codes of ethics, the truth undergoes some shaping and colouring at the hands of skillful PR practitioners.

  To demonstrate this, let us contrast the activities to the public statements of

  Ivy Lee, sometimes regarded as the founder of public relations. Before doing so, we

  will examine some of the provisions of the Code of Ethics, as adopted by the Public

  Relations Society of America in 1988, whose preamble includes a declaration of princi-

  ples and a pledge that its members will act according to principles reflecting the value

  and dignity of the individual and of human rights, along with the freedoms of speech,

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  assembly, and the press guaranteed in the US Bill of Rights. According to the code, members must conduct their professional life in accordance with the public interest,

  with honesty and integrity, dealing fairly and adhering to the truth in all cases, and

  avoiding the dissemination of information known to be false or misleading to the

  public and which might disrupt or corrupt the media or the government. Moreover,

  members must be willing to disclose the names of their clients and in whose interest

  they are acting.19

  The Canadian Public Relations Society’s (CPRS) Code of Professional Standards

  is less elaborate but still provides that members “shall practice public relations accord-

  ing to the highest professional standards ... shall deal fairly and honestly with the com-

  munications media and the public ... shall practice the highest standards of honesty,

  accuracy, integrity and truth, and shall not knowingly disseminate false or misleading

  information.”20


  Critics within the profession have called attention to ways in which the obliga-

  tions of PR practitioners to their clients can be at odds with the proclaimed ethical

  concerns for the public good and for the highest standards of honesty and truth. Peter

  O’Malley, an Ottawa-based communications consultant and a member of CPRS for

  over 15 years, pointed out that, while transparency may often be helpful to a client,

  sometimes it is not. In many instances, he writes, the client’s interest may lie in “seeing

  that a particular fact, or set of facts, never see the light of day.” Or if they do it may lie in minimizing

  the impact, duration and even the clarity of any resulting reporting and public com-

  munications. This is called crisis avoidance and damage control. As we all know, it

  constitutes a large part of what we do for a living. It is also what many clients most

  value in our work.

  O’Malley argues that where a client’s culpability is low, the best strategy may lie along

  the path of “honesty, accuracy, integrity and truth.” This happened when the makers

  of Tylenol, a pain-relieving pill, were victimized by someone who inserted poisons

  into bottles on drugstore shelves (this, by the way, led to the practice of applying safety

  seals to the lids of many such products). On the other hand, if culpability is high, as

  in the Bhopal disaster—a chemical leak from a factory in India that affected thou-

  sands—or when the oil tanker, the Exxon Valdez, ran aground and broke up, causing severe environmental and ecological damage—“damage control almost always means

  being highly selective in what is said publicly, and very careful about when and where

  anything at all is said.” O’Malley makes it clear that he is not defending lying but the

  selective presentation of information and practice of secrecy to further the client’s

  interest. This practice does not necessarily serve to “enlighten the public.” In sum, he

  claims that, because we live with freedom of the press, it is important to have knowl-

  edgeable people defend an institution’s interest by control ing what information gets

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