What You See Isn't Always What You Get

Sissela Bok, an American philosopher and ethicist said “While all deception requires secrecy, all secrecy is not meant to deceive.”  When thinking about product placement and guerilla marketing, strategic communicators need consider what their ultimate goal should be. Are you attempting to deceive the consumer in order to make them believe a product or service is better than it really is? Or are you simply trying to break down the walls that skeptical consumers have risen over the years in order to get them to evaluate a product or service openly and objectively? Varying degrees of deception are used in advertising every day. Placing product throughout a film or television show is simply a covert way to trick your mind into associating that product with that actor or show. If I’m a nineteen year old girl who sees Kim Kardashian drinking a Starbucks® drink then I naively may believe if I drink it too then I will be more like Kim Kardashian.

Lord help us all. Nonetheless, marketers have been using outright product placements to convince the general public that this athlete or this celebrity uses these products. The question is where do we draw the line? 

Consumers are inundated with marketing messages and sales pitches incessantly. Strategic communicators are challenged to find new and creative ways to make their messages stand out. In Michael Serazio’s doctoral thesis “Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing”, he discusses how Song Erikson used paid actors to pose as tourist in Times Square in order to expose consumers to a new camera phone. Personally, I think this was a brilliant way to get some honest feedback about what the average consumer thought about the product. Perhaps to make it less deceptive they could have instructed to actors to reveal they were working for the manufacturer if asked, but most people probably wouldn’t ask because they would just continue under the assumption the actor was exactly as they appeared to be- a fellow tourist. Many organizations use semi-professional bloggers and social media gurus to provide hype and feedback on their products or services. In “Recasting Social Media Users as Brand Ambassadors: Opening the Doors to the First ‘Social Suite’”,  Avery Holton and Mark Coddington put together a case study analyzing the Cleveland Indians Social Suite experiment and its impact on the organization and sports organizations as a whole. By using the influence of semi-professional bloggers and social media influencers, they were able to affect the image and ultimately the number of seats sold for Indian baseball games. Now these bloggers were given some great perks. A box suite and all access pass to the Indians organization were just a couple. Granted, if a consumer were to research the Social Suite member, they would find out their affiliation with the organization. But not simply by reading a Tweet generated in the 7th inning. This method proved very successful for the Indians and other organizations went on to implement similar programs.  This was a great example of more covert marketing tactics. By using these popular bloggers and social media gurus, the Cleveland Indians were able to regain the trust and support of their fans. 

Chris Moore wrote an article for the Advertising Educational Foundation in 2006 discussing ethics in advertising.  I think he is right on track when he states “Let's start with Truth in Advertising. Telling the truth seems like a pretty basic ethical standard. But as any Philosophy major can tell you, there's Truth ... and then there's Truth”. He goes on to say

 “Something marketers are beginning to realize is that how a brand actually behaves counts more than what they say. This is good news. Advertising copywriters used to have a monopoly on telling a brand's story. Now, thanks to the Internet, the most influential voices in advertising are yours: You hear about a product, the first thing you do is go online and see what your peers are saying about it. Advertisers know this. Ads for reputable companies almost never lie. The cost of being caught out is simply too high. It can take years to undo the damage. Also, the people inside the company want to be able to look at themselves in the mirror. We often think of business people as belonging to some other, vaguely malevolent species, but remember that most of them are you in a few years. So we tell the truth - but not always the whole truth. We want to put our clients in the best light. McDonalds doesn't advertise the calorie count for Big Macs, but they make it easy to find out. Most people don't want to know. On the other hand, drug makers have to spell out side-effects because the information can mean life or death. How much of the truth we owe to others is an ethical question. In practice, the answer depends on who they are and what's at stake.” 

This is what advertisers must always ask- what is at stake? Where is that invisible ethical line in the sand? 

You can’t conveniently leave out information that a new weight loss drug on the market may cause cancer in order to sell more products.  But you can direct potential patients to a blog on your website loaded with testimonials from patients who have had major success while taking the drug.  You can show Kim Kardashian drinking Starbucks® but you can’t say it’s going to give you a rear end that when exposed naked will break the internet. Again, Lord help us. Where I believe advertisers must take the most responsibility in the degree of deception are with the most vulnerable in society. In a 2014 article, the American Public Health Association estimated that the tobacco industry spends $3.6 billion in advertising and the alcohol industry spends approximately $20 billion. Balancing between promoting free speech and protecting our children is a tricky quagmire. In 1992, the Surgeon General as well as the American Medical Association stepped in and asked RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company to discontinue the use of cartoon characters in its advertising due to the attraction of the ads with children.

As strategic communicators we have a responsibility to society to protect those whose minds are not fully developed enough to know they are being deceived. We must always ask if your secrecy or omissions in promotions for our organizations are there to intentionally deceive for dishonest objectives or for something more honorable.