Morality In Advertising
Do advertisers and companies have a moral obligation to avoid stereotypes? Personally, I do not believe they do. Morality does not have a place in a company trying to make money off potentially harmful stereotypes in advertising, unless their targeted audience is moral in their beliefs. Even then, if their ads are targeted at the moral and those who believe stereotyping is wrong, the companies are still using stereotypes to target them. You cannot create a successful advertisement without targeting people and you might find it difficult to target someone without a perceived notion or image on the targets views and beliefs. If these people are against stereotypes, such as gender roles and racial stereotypes, then the companies trying to appeal to these audiences are going to have to make assumptions on these people and stereotype them to get them interested in the product the company is trying to push. Not to mention that advertisements are put produced by companies, made up of a variety of people giving input and making decisions on what they believe would make a good advertisement. With a group of people, there is no pre-stated moral belief that they all completely share. Very few companies have policies to follow morals set up throughout the company. Advertisements are created to make money. If it is known that stereotyping works and makes the company the money thet are working and spending time to get, the actions caused by their stereotypes is not going to matter to them. Not all stereotypes are bad either. Are companies supposed to change their entire outlook and operation because a small percentage of a population, most likely not even their targeted audience, is offended by an ad that will have very little to do with them personally. Should the people of a company, not in charge of creating offensive ads, be affected and punished for decisions that are out of their hands, due to some negative reactions in the work they have to do to provide money for themselves? Innocent lives should not be affected by a negative reaction to a simple marketing technique.
even though i wrote an opposing argument on this issue I agree with your perspectives on this situation about the morality of stereotyping people. I admire how you gave a valid view point on why the issue has not been solved yet and why it will not be solved due to the profits of making stereotypical ads. There were some good points on how the advertisers should not be punished even if a small part of the society demands these advertisements to be taken down. There were some sentences where i feel like you have already spoken about a particular area.
ReplyDeleteAlso heyyyy ! you can delete this
DeleteI strongly agree with your point that stereoypes in marketing mostly exist to establish a target audience. I also agree that sterotypes are used to create profit and we can't blame advertiseres for trying to make a living and earn money. My only improvement to your analysis would be to eleborate on the point of "Not all stereotypes are bad either" by giving a few examples.
ReplyDeleteYou make very good points, an advertisers job is to increase sales and they may do that by enforcing stereotypes in order to appeal to their targeted audience. Most of the time, the individuals that are offended by advertisements are out of the product's targeted audience. When thinking about it, the audience allows advertisers to be lenient with their moral obligations (if they have any). Why should advertisers stop doing their job effectively?
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