Preparing advertising festival is not for the faint of heart these days. There is money, there are egos, there is truth and there are ghosts. But egos and money are capable of rationalizing any lie into snow-white truth. Such a display of faulty ethics could tell something about the industry?

There is an debated article that comes in mind "Moral shortsightedness common in business" by Ken Camp and it is debated partly for its source: The Baptist Standard online magazine. Ok, let's forget the source for a minute and have a look on the text:

«Many advertising executives fail to see any ethical implications of their work, and if they do see moral problems, they refuse to talk about them, a University of Texas professor has discovered. [...]

Drumwright, associate professor of advertising at UT, and Patrick Murphy, a marketing professor at the University of Notre Dame, interviewed more than 50 advertising practitioners at 29 agencies in eight cities to discover how they perceive ethical issues.

The researchers found most of the people they interviewed suffered from "moral myopia"--a distorted moral vision that keeps ethical issues from coming into focus--and "moral muteness"--an unwillingness to talk about moral concerns»

Now comes a cute one. You know it because you've seen it. In this war where any weapon is allowed, suddenly someone stands tall and blows a whistle: Fault! Fraud! Forget about my ghosts for a minute and look there: that idea is stolen! This is not ethical!

"They don't see the ethical issues unless they are tied to their own self-interests, such as when they think someone is stealing their idea."

Sometimes things get even harder, and it's even harder to judge: «Another problem advertisers face is becoming so immersed in their clients' corporate culture they lose all objectivity. "Anthropologists refer to this as 'going native,'" Drumwright said. For ad agency representatives, "going native" means becoming so identified with their clients' perspective and product claims they lose the ability to make critical moral judgments. They believe their own lies without recognizing them as such.»

The article made some rounds around the net and many echoed it: AdRants, MarketingVox among others, and it is bound to be printed in The Journal of Advertising. Many bloggers referred to it, and here is a sample:

«To get to the heart of the matter, the article from The Baptist Standard reinforces and validates with academic credentials something that I have thought and felt for a long time. Working in advertising stinks and is amoral to being with. Its basic purpose is dehumanizing and demoralizing. People working in advertising are some of the most voracious consumers to be found anywhere. They spend so much time and effort selling things to others that they sell themselves at the same time: on the products, on the consumption, on the lifestyle. They hear the stories in the advertisements so often that the narrative becomes overwhelming, consumer stories end up as the first ones that we are able to tell. I know the symptoms of amorality and the circumstances of compartmentalization because I work in marketing and advertising.» [James Sherrett of Blog for Up in Ontario]

"Its basic purpose is dehumanizing and demoralizing"? Wohoo, I thought is informing customer in his right to chose and help sales! Not so fast with the "Working in advertising stinks and is amoral to being with" claims. This is quicksand here. And is damn hard to draw a line. What happens when you are perfectly honnest trying to solve a brief on a fake product without knowing it is fake? What happens when you write and shoot advertising campaigns for dying banks or fraud-driven investment funds without knowing so?

Even if you were perfectly honest and clean, working for a dirty account makes you accessory to the fraud. And you get dirty, this is what happens.

From that point on i've seen people walking two different paths: the first is the path of endless apologizes and of refusal to work on dubious accounts. The second is the development of the moral myopia and hiding behind constructs like "I am only doing my job", "it's the brief" and "the truth is client-sides' responsibility, not mine".

From a different perspective comes the point of another blogger, and I left it at the end for its spectacular turn:

« It looks as if Drumwright and Murphy broke the first rule of qualitative research. Ethnographers may not supply the terms with which respondents describe their experience and, still more fundamentally, they may not fault respondents for using terms other than our own. Apparently, Drumwright and Murphy are accusing the agency world of failing to care about the things Drumwright and Murphy care about.

I can hear the objection: but surely morality matters to everyone. This is certainly true. And so does motherhood. What would happen if we were to rush into most contemporary organizations and demand a cogent position of this topic? I’d be surprised if one were were forthcoming. Plainly, this would not entitle us to say that the organization in question doesn’t not care about motherhood or that it suffered “maternal myopia.”

What’s really scary is that Drumwright and Murphy’s methodological error actually creates their finding. When Drumwright and Murphy interview executives and find them unable to supply a detailed moral account of their actions and their industry, they take this as evidence of a moral myopia and muteness. But what they call an important, telling, damning absence is only absent because they insist it should be present!

If we dig down (this is after all anthropology), we find a presumption that there is something so dubious about advertising that in fact the executives should have a well developed moral understanding of what they do. That this is a peculiar assumption is, I think, demonstrated by the fact that we would be surprised if a pair of researchers descended on the world of dentistry and returned with the indignant declaration that this world has no active moral vision of itself. (I believe we would have the right to reply, with all due solemnity and eloquence, "hey, it's dentistry.") » [Grant McCracken of This Blog Sits at]

Tough. Draw you own conclusion, people.