Examining the Nexus between Advertising Ethics and Culture.

At its most fundamental level, ethics is often understood as a reference to “just or “right” standards of behaviour between parties in a situation, based on individual moral philosophies” (Bush and Bush 1994, p. 32). By extension, advertising ethics tends to focus on “what is right or wrong in the conduct of the advertising function, and concerns questions of what ought to be done, not just what legally must be done” (Cunningham 1999, p. 500). Classifications of ad ethics differentiate between message (or content) and business ethics (Drumwright and Murphy 2009; Drumwright 2012). Message ethics relates to the ethical parameters surrounding the creation, dissemination and processing of ad messages or the ‘micro’ perspective (Drumwright, 2012) of ad ethics. In contrast, a business ethics approach adopts an organisational or ‘meso’ perspective (Drumwright, 2012) and deals with the ethics of the ad industry. The focus within this stream has been on uncovering practitioner attitudes towards ad ethics (Drumwright and Murphy 2004; Drumright and Kala 2016) or on how ad agencies should manage ethics (e.g. Hyman et al. 1990; Drumwright and Murphy 2009; Hyman 2009). Linking both these streams is yet a third more earlier perspective based on a largely philosophical or ‘macro’ approach (Drumwright 2012) focusing on the aggregate effects of advertising. Here, the debate revolves around whether advertising serves as a ‘mirror’, merely reflecting the values of its target audiences (Holbrook 1987) or instead as a ‘distorted mirror’, and therefore as a manipulator of audience values (Pollay 1986; 1987). Despite the rich stream of studies exploring specific domains of consumer ad ethics, our knowledge of what constitutes ad ethics purely from a consumer’s perspective remains much more limited. As a result, our understanding of the relationship between different audience derived ethical domains is also lacking.
Compounding the aforementioned gap in knowledge, is the notable absence of exploring ad ethics from different cultural perspectives beyond Western markets (Drumwright and Kala 2016; Moon and Franke 2000). As Drumright and Kamal (2016, p. 173) argue this gap in our knowledge “has not received attention commiserate with its importance”. The notion that ethics vary across cultures has a rich and established tradition (Casmir 2013). Consumer perceived ethics are also dependent on cultural variations and by default, perceived ad ethics is also bound by a cultural dilemma since the target audience’s “culture filters our perceptions of what constitutes good or responsible consumption” (Belk et al. 2005, p. 7). Rising concerns of ad ethics in the popular and trade press of other global marketing contexts warrants extending the contextual domain of ad ethics (Drumright and Kamal 2016). As LaFerle (2015, p. 163) notes, if ad agencies are to succeed in an increasingly diverse marketplace, then “ethical behaviour and cultural knowledge are key”. This study therefore proposes to extend the domain of ad ethics by seeking investigate the structure of ad ethics from a cross cultural perspective. In doing so, a new understanding is sought on the relationship between ad ethics and cultural values.