Oct
22
Marketing Ethics
Posted by: coltonfoster | October 22, 2010 | Leave a Comment
This is the ad I chose to do my COMM 299 marketing ethics speech on. The ad is by a public health organization called Truth. This ad comes from the “do you have what it takes to be a tobacco exec?” campaign. The labels on the jars read “an award winning smile” and “a brain that can rationalize the fact that your industry’s products kills someone every 6.5 seconds.” This provides a rather harsh criticism of the tobacco industry. While I certainly have no love for the tobacco industry or smoking in general, I believe that this ad is trying to tell consumers where their moral values should lie and therefore is somewhat unethical. I think in this day and age the bulk of the population knows that smoking is detrimental to one’s health – however this ad seems to be targeting the industry and its executives rather than the act of smoking. I don’t particularly like tobacco executives, yet I feel that smoking is a choice that many people make, and a great deal more simply lack the motivation to quit. I’m not saying it is an easy thing to stop smoking, just that it is possible for many people if they seriously wanted to. People that choose to consume tobacco products are the ones keeping these executives on the payroll, therefore I am a little confused as to why the campaign decides to lash out against these execs. Sure, their products provide harm to many people, yet as I said before it is a choice. Furthermore the selling and consumption of cigarettes is perfectly legal…if organizations like this feel that the killing is so awful maybe they should start petitioning for some sort of legislation against tobacco. While I definitely support an anti-smoking campaign..I believe the decision to target executives is rather unprofessional and would not be my choice for a large-scale ad campaign.