Toward an Ethical and Legal Framework for Minimizing Advertising Violations

Abstract

Ethical violations in the advertising field have triggered justifiable and plausible concerns and action by lawmakers, regulators, government, and society, as well as firms in the industry. The related literature contains a preliminary framework for consolidating various ethical issues in advertising under four umbrella dimensions, namely, the ethical violations pertaining to the sender', the message', the product', and the target audience' of the advertising communication (for example, see Byramjee, Klein and Batra, 2010). This paper attempts to supplement and strengthen that framework by suitably appropriating and explaining many of the recognized and practiced legal perspectives and regulatory implications for each of these four factors leading to ethical violations in advertising. The discourse attempts to consolidate the salient features pertaining to ethical violations within each of these factors, and presents detailed explanative regarding the legal and regulatory norms, rules, codes, laws, and legalities-in-practice to mitigate their influences on potentially impacted stakeholders.

Does Viral Communication Context Increase the Harmfulness of Controversial Taboo Advertising?

“…The established results warn practitioners and regulatory bodies of the risks associated with viral advertising in the trivialization of taboo behaviors and imagery. The findings reinforce the debate on the ethical issues related to this communication medium (Byramjee et al 2013) and the need for tighter regulation (Sprague and Wells 2010).…”

How to Build Consumer Trust: Socially Responsible or Controversial Advertising

“…Based on the analysis of literature concerning controversial and ethical advertising [79][80][81][82][83][84][85][86][87][88][89][90][91][92] in the paper, we define socially responsible advertising as marketing activities which do not arouse negative emotions and do not breach ethical values or ideals shared by customers. The notion of socially responsible advertising comprises a set of standards and rules of conduct adopted in the advertising industry and it refers to relationships between an enterprise and its customers, partners, employees and competitors affected by advertising activities [93,94].…”

“…The scope of controversy in advertising is pervasive, but we can identify four main dimensions of presenting controversial inputs: Unethical contents or pictures, improper or misused media, advertising controversial products, and targeting a controversially defined market [81]. Controversies in advertising boil down to the presentation of messages in a surprising way with regard to their content and form.…”