Prize Winning Ads & Ethics

I think the main role of advertising is to persuade customers to purchase or consume a certain brand, product or service. Ads deliver a message to a target audience, and this audience will respond to it, most of the time it will be in the way the advertisers intended and wanted.

Most of the advertisements we see these days are designed so people can increase the consumption of a product / service. Ads use very powerful and persuasive messages to get to their potential costumers, and use every major medium (tv, newspaper, radio, magazine, billboards, amongst others) to deliver it. But, in addition to selling a message, advertisements encode cultural values and social ideas. And depending on your point of view it is a positive or negative component of our society.

It is difficult for us to separate ourselves from advertisement, not only because we see it everyday, but also because we are part of it, we help create ads, messages, ideas; we help persuade and influences the audience. This is where ethics come in, in the WAY you get to people. Is it a negative or positive message? Is it lying or telling the truth? Is the product really that good or are we just boosting its qualities to sell it?

I think it is important to be able to be a great designer, participate in big and important ad campaigns (if that’s your thing) and still hold on to your values, be ethical. People sometimes will do anything to sell a product, and there is nothing more disappointing than buying something you really wanted and was promised to be excellent, and finding out it really isn’t. It was a lie. This has happened to all of us.

Ethics are a big part of our everyday life, and ads, but for some people it is not as important as for others. Some people really don’t care about sending the wrong message to the audience or about deceiving people, even in the smallest way.

In Costa Rica we have a big problem with our big ad agencies. Most of them don't create campaigns based on their clients’ needs, but with a different thought in mind. They create huge and important campaigns with the purpose of winning a prize at the end of the year for their "wonderful, creative, and innovative ideas", (which the client is happy with because his campaign won, and seems to forget that it doesn't meet the real needs for his product). This leads to lying, or maybe lying is a strong word, “stretching the truth”, building up your product to something it is not, and creating advertisements with your best interests in mind, and not the clients’.

This is the biggest problem we are dealing with in CR. This is not ethical; they compromise the clients’ needs for their own popularity. And they enjoy winning these awards so much, that a “war” between agencies can be expected depending on the results. This is 3rd world mentality, and it is such a pity. Luckily in these couple of years smaller studios have been evolving and creating really exceptional and valuable designs. Hopefully this will continue, so we can break the cycle of designing to win awards and we can embrace our ethics back.

At the end of the day we are all consumers, we all buy, good and bad things, we all believe some messages all the time, or most of the time. So I think it’s just a matter of thinking where YOU want to be in advertising and design, and how far you would go to sell a product/idea or to win a prize.