The well-known saying “keeping up with the Joneses” is given concrete meaning in the 2010 film “The Joneses,” in which a team hired by a marketing firm pose as a family in suburbia live and advertise the American Dream to their wealthy neighbours.

Stealth advertising, as described by Sandra L. Calvert in her book The Future of Children, is a method in which “marketers attempt to conceal the intent of an ad” by blurring the lines between content and advertising so the consumer doesn’t recognize it as advertising (an extreme example would be Derrick Borte’s film The Joneses). They are feasible marketing strategies in which actors use products in public, causally interacting with the customers about the product. This method recently used by Sony-Ericsson makes me question whether stealth advertising is an ethical practice: there seems to be some grey area. If people ask if the actors are hired, they have to say yes; but if they don’t, then consumers don’t know that they are being marketed at. I feel that consumers should have a right to know if someone is trying to sell them a product, be the method direct or indirect. Our world of consumerism is already so concentrated with brand names, blasts from the producers, and trademarks that throwing another company’s marketing strategy in the mix can overwhelm us and affect the decisions we make as consumers.

In the end it comes back to the consumer, as it should: we drive the economy, be it through need or desire. And as a consumer, I think that I should take the initiative to make good consumer decisions, because the idea of ethics in marketing is a two-way street: if I decide to purchase a product, even if the advertisement made me feel self-conscious, I’m letting someone somewhere know that their technique worked, despite how degraded I may have felt by their method of communicating this product. As consumers, we should decide the effectiveness of marketing strategies, not give into a cycle of inadequacy and guilt for our lifestyle choices.