Advertising: a code of ethics

Corporate Social Responsibility has been an early focus for this blog, which has made a modest pitch that goes beyond the idea of an ethical form of public relations practice. Instead it looks at how ethics can be placed at the heart of business activity, with the PR practitioner charged with placing them there.

For some, typical examples being SpinWatch, that idea must grate as the industry is most often regarded as manipulative and dishonest. I suspect the reputation is deserved and I’m surprised that only 40 per cent of media stories on PR report the industry that way.

But while I don’t think of myself as adman, I do feel a little peeved at the idea that an advertising executive convicted of fraud might benefit that industry by writing a code of ethics as part of the community service element of her sentence.

The problem with the resulting code, apart from ignoring all the hard work of academia, existing codes and anything ever written on business ethics, is that it’s a bit of a whinge about the complex accounting methods that brought her down. It’s a little sorrowful – given that the author’s in prison for 18 months, that’s to be forgiven – and far too specific to her crime of overcharging. So I’d have failed her.

Public relations has always had a hang-up over whether it’s a profession or a trade and an early response to these feelings of insecurity was an attempt to model public relations practice on the law. The idea was that just as the most evil criminal deserves to be robustly defended in a court of law, so the most evil corporations deserve to be robustly defended in the court of public opinion. That’s proved a non-starter for all sorts of reasons, but mainly because law courts are highly controlled environments with firm controls in place that are designed, with high principle in mind, to ensure level playing fields and that reliable evidence et cetera guides the opinion forming process. That can’t be replicated outside of the courtroom.

Nevertheless, that a US judge thought a code of ethics for advertising might be a novel idea reflects badly on all marketing communicators. Public relations remains well placed to evolve out of marketing’s shadow into something focused on corporate responsibility, but that will only be achieved by those who understand that the industry has responsibilities that go beyond the bottom line.
Contact Stephen Newton

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