The ethical arguments concerning the banning of tobacco advertising.

University Degree Business and Administrative studies

Business Ethics and Corporate Responsibility

BUSM 3104

Student Number: 07004479

In this essay, I will examine the ethical arguments concerning the banning of tobacco advertising as well as an evaluation of the social, economic and political pressures tobacco organisations face . In particular, I will explore the ethics of the partial bans on tobacco advertising, since there are now few countries which do not restrict tobacco advertising in some way.

Part of the debate about the ethics of tobacco advertising involves consideration of ethical questions about advertising. Advertising is the attempt by owners of goods and services to persuade current and potential consumers to continue or start purchasing. The intention of advertisers is, therefore, to portray products in ways that will maximise their desirability to potential consumers. Some commentators on the ethics of advertising have sought to draw a distinction between its informative and persuasive functions, arguing that pure 'information' in advertising (as said to be exemplified by classified advertisements and yellow page telephone directory listings) is 'moral' because it facilitates rational decision-making and choice. However, 'persuasive' advertising is argued to be unethical because, drawing on Kantian ethics, it affects consumers' 'autonomy' by convincing them to purchase goods which they do not 'need'. This argument has been severely criticised as resting on a false or simplistic dichotomies of wants and needs and of information and persuasion information can be highly persuasive, and the persuasive associations lent to a product by advertising can be argued to be as much part of the true 'meaning' or reality of that product

to consumers as its physical properties.

Information in tobacco advertising?

One of the cornerstones of the argument in favour of advertising generally is that advertising provides consumers with information about products and services being offered for sale. Classical economists argue that efficiency is optimised when all parties in an economic transaction have maximum information. The usual sorts of information exemplified in such arguments include price, the attributes of a product and notice of availability.

Does tobacco advertising provide such information and help facilitate choice? Mention of price is virtually absent in tobacco advertising, except at point of sale, where discounting is rampant in tobacco retailing. Descriptions of product yield attributes are common in advertising and brand naming, but these are frequently specious ('fresh'), patently subjective ('luxury', 'super'). Also, because many smokers block the tiny air vent holes with their fingers or lips, thereby greatly increasing the yields of tar and nicotine they inhale when compared to the smoking machine determined yields cited in advertising and on packs, cigarette advertising is in this respect arguably misleading. The argument that tobacco advertising provides information is thus largely bankrupt when examined against actual practice.

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Some have argued that so-called 'tombstone' advertising showing only the cigarette pack with the product name ought to be considered a benign non-persuasive form of tobacco advertising which might be said to satisfy the basic criteria for 'information only' advertising. The assumption here is that tombstone advertising essentially is 'here it is!' advertising, informing consumers about the name of the brand, its packaging, the number of cigarettes in it, and sometimes the tar and nicotine yields. Putting aside manipulative efforts such as Marlboro's Belgian initiative during the 1980s of putting the picture of the Marlboro cowboy on the pack in anticipation of overcoming a move to tombstone advertising, it is fallacious to argue that pack-only advertising is somehow devoid of persuasive intent. A great deal of research goes into the selection of names, pack design and into the selection of seemingly bland words in the slogans that accompany pictures of packs. Every effort is made to make tombstone advertising as enticing as possible.

Deception through omission?

Another way of approaching the question of whether advertising is misleading is to ask whether there are aspects of a product which if omitted from advertising, would result in consumers being misled. For example, consumer protection laws in many countries insist that financial services advertising make explicit claims about terms of credit, so serious are the consequences for consumers should they be misled. The questions arising here concern whether there are fundamental issues about a product that should be mandatory in any advertising for it. With tobacco advertising, many argue that the risks of use are so high that, at very least, advertising should be accompanied by detailed health warnings worded so as to maximise their comprehensibility and resonance.

However, here many have pointed out the tobacco industry's long record in constructing advertising designed to mock, distract and generally undermine such health warnings. In Australia in 1995, Rothmans modified its pack design after bold new warnings were introduced so that a warning on the front of the flip-top box such as 'Smoking when pregnant harms your baby' is accompanied by the contemptuous advertising slogan 'Anyhow have a Winfield' printed on the inside of the flip-top box. This mockery has recently reached its apotheosis with the launch and promotion of Death cigarettes in the Europe. Here Death's owners have turned health warnings into an 'in your face' gesture of proud defiance so that the risks of smoking are not only acknowledged, but held out as a badge of audacity, risk-taking and scorn on safe living. The advent of the Death brand illustrates perhaps more completely than all previous argument, the ability of advertising to appropriate virtually any appeal even a message overtly antithetical to the product and turn it into a marketing edge using the massive advertising budgets available to the industry. This ability would appear to transcend all guidelines and thematic restraints on advertising copy and hence act to largely neutralise the intent of health warnings for some people.

Some commentators have argued that the ethics of advertising should be inextricably linked to questions about the 'goodness' of the products being advertised. Leiser and Lee argue that 'the advertisement of a bad product cannot be good', with Leiser arguing that persuasive and seductive appeals can be ethically defensible if they have been put to the service of promoting beneficial ends (for example, using nostalgic appeals to country life to sell fruit and vegetables or using scare tactics to persuade people not to drink alcohol before driving). This emphasis on the product rather than on the way it is advertised is at the heart of all concern about tobacco advertising. Critics of the RJ Reynolds' Joe Camel cartoon character's appeal to very young children have not been critical of the use of an anthropomorphic cartoon character in itself (cartoons have been often used to promote health), but rather of the use of the cartoon to promote Camel cigarettes to children. Critics of the use of sexuality to sell cigarettes are not generally opposed to sensual or erotic imagery, but to the use to which it is put: to make cigarettes seem attractive.

Herein lies the nub of opposition to tobacco advertising. Its critics argue that whatever its effects (and using reductionist methodologies,

these are extraordinarily difficult to dissect from the contemporaneous influence of other tobacco control strategies) the intention of tobacco advertisers is by definition to promote tobacco use. The 'brand switching' argument is quite irrelevant to this concern, for a brand cannot be promoted without promoting smoking itself. If governments have policies

to reduce tobacco use, policies that allow tobacco advertising are simply inconsistent with these.

By any standard, tobacco is no ordinary product. A recent US Surgeon General stated in the preface to the 1990 Surgeon General's report on smoking: 'it is safe to say that smoking represents the most extensively documented cause of disease ever investigated in the history of biomedical research'. The first section of this book documents the effects of tobacco use still further. Efforts to ban tobacco advertising have not been mounted because of ethical concerns for the imagery and persuasive rhetoric employed, but because the intention of this advertising is to promote tobacco use. And there is a wealth of evidence that it succeeds in doing so.

Being no ordinary product in causing the catastrophic degree of harm and cost to both individuals and the state that it does throughout populations, advocates of banning advertising argue that it is reasonable that tobacco should be subject to extraordinary controls designed to reduce this harm. Controlling advertising is but one form of such control.

Tobacco advertising and children

In many countries, it is illegal to sell tobacco to children. This is of critical

relevance to any discussion on the ethics of tobacco advertising. Where laws forbid the sale of tobacco products to children, it is because children are said to be below an age where their informed consent can be assumed. It is, therefore, reasoned that tobacco advertising appeals directed at them or which can be shown to appeal to them are unethical in that they seek or cause to influence consent in people deemed legally incapable of consenting.

It has been repeatedly shown that children do indeed see, recall, admire, discuss and generally relate to advertising in the same sort of ways that adults are intended to do by tobacco advertisers. Apart from the obvious point that the tobacco industry makes much money from sales to underage smokers38, the research on the impact of advertising on children makes nonsense of any pretence that advertising is 'targeted' only to adult smokers.

With the exception of premises where children are forbidden by law from entering (for example casinos, legal brothels, some premises licensed to sell alcohol), there are no advertising sites nor media to which children do not have the same access as adults. Some countries have arrangements, usually in the form of voluntary codes negotiated with the tobacco industry, that tobacco advertising will be 'restrained' in various ways. In entering such voluntary agreements, the tobacco industry typically asserts that it is not intent on targeting its advertising at children, further asserting that it regards smoking as 'an adult custom' and does not wish children to smoke.

For example, several countries in the past have endorsed voluntary

agreements with the industry whereby cigarette advertisements will only be screened on television late at night, and not placed on billboards closer than 200 metres from schools. In such arrangements, an admission is being made by government and industry, as parties to these agreements, that there is a case for trying to minimise the exposure of children to such advertising that if they were exposed, the advertisements might succeed in the same intent that they have for adults.

In practice, the logic of partial or selective tobacco advertising bans is equivalent to the ambition to be 'a little bit pregnant'. Many children do not go to bed before the arbitrary times after which cigarette advertising is screened, and with the popularisation of video recorders, many children record programs including advertisements screened after their bedtime. The logic of banning tobacco billboards adjacent to schools is even more absurd. Here, it is being suggested that a child sighting such a billboard 195 metres from a school might be influenced by its message, but the same child sighting the same advertisement 205 metres from a school would somehow be immune from its persuasions.

Partial bans carry with them an ethical conviction that tobacco advertising should be controlled, but belie this conviction by allowing the very same advertising that is banned to be displayed in the different media still permitted to carry such advertising. Such absurdity can only be interpreted as the product of an ethical duplicity cynically put to the service of collusive governmental and industry posturing about their responsibilities to children.

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