What is the difference between Joe Camel and the Bud Knight?

By Zac Wenzel

We as Americans are used to being sold things by various people and companies. Sometimes those things are essential to our everyday life, sometimes they are indulgences, and sometimes they are things we could potentially be manipulated into thinking we want or need.

A very specific example I want to touch upon of ethics and morality rearing its head in advertising deals with three main goods; tobacco, alcohol, and prescription drugs. Why do we no longer have cigarette commercials or public advertising, but we are inundated with alcohol and prescription drug commercials and billboards? Surely as much if not more death and suffering has been caused by the two we still advertise and the one we do not. 

Principle 8 of the Advertising Ethics is, and I quote, “Advertisers and their agencies, and online and offline media, should discuss privately potential ethical concerns, and members of the team creating ads should be given permission to express internally their ethical concerns.” But yet in the 1980’s, the tobacco industry launched widespread and extensive counter-advertising to one of the United States first statewide ad campaign In Minnesota on the dangers of smoking on users and the environment, as discussed in this 2007 report from National Center for Biotechnology Information. The fact that the tobacco industry spent this amount of energy and almost certainly cash on this effort, raises major ethical questions in and of itself. Including ads like the one below from a 2008 New York Times article by Stuart Elliot using doctors as an advertising tool to sell cigarettes. The point being that the tobacco companies knew what they were doing and tried numerous techniques of advertising something that was at the very least walking the ethical line.

Stuart Elliot - The New York Times

Some might attribute the tobacco ads from the 70s and 80s to the fact that times were simply different, but should ethics be a pliable thing to be shaped around the times? Or should our society be shaped by ethics. You can see parallels today when it comes to alcohol and prescription drug commercials. Are we to believe that those companies do not know the negative effects of their aggressive advertising? In the defense of alcohol, more and more drink responsibly disclaimers have been introduced to their ads and of course prescription drug commercials always conclude with a list of side effects and possible outcomes. One thing is certain, that ethical line continues to be walked like a tightrope