- Question
- Is advertising morally wrong?
- Position‹2 of 2
- No, there’s nothing morally wrong with advertising
- Argument‹2 of 2
Advertising is just a form of marketing
Marketing is a great tool to help businesses grow. Without marketing, businesses wouldn't find smart ways to grow and find new customers.
The argument
Advertisement is simply a form of marketing, and the argument here is that recognising this dissolves most of the moral objection to it. Marketing is the business of telling potential customers what exists, what it does and what it costs. Advertising performs that function at scale, and the two words are so often used interchangeably precisely because the boundary between them is hard to draw — which suggests advertising is not a distinct practice with its own ethics but the ordinary informational activity of commerce. What that activity produces is useful to both sides of a transaction. Marketing helps businesses grow, which is how firms that make something worth having come to reach the people who want it. It also lets customers know when there is something new in the market, and a customer who does not know a product exists cannot buy it however well it would serve them. Information flowing between sellers and buyers is a condition of a functioning market rather than an imposition on it. The scale of the practice is sometimes offered as evidence that something must be wrong: in 2019 about 560 billion dollars were spent on advertising globally. Proponents of this position read that figure the other way. Expenditure on that scale reflects how effective the activity is at doing what it sets out to do, and effectiveness at conveying information is not a vice. Scale alone is not an argument: a great deal is spent on every function commerce genuinely needs, and large expenditure on a useful activity is evidence of its usefulness rather than of wrongdoing. Advertising will always be used, because as long as goods are made and sold someone must tell buyers about them. Since it is nothing more than marketing — informing customers, helping businesses grow — there is nothing morally wrong with advertising.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Marketing and advertising should not be mixed up. Marketing involves research and is a long-term process, while advertisement is only supposed to bring short term awareness to a business. Relying heavily on advertisement would be a waste of money.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P2] Marketing and advertising are two different things.