Advertising Ethics

After all of the readings I've read through for this course on advertising, what code, what rules, and what moral compass do I think advertisers should steer by?
I think advertisers need to be intensely aware of the vulnerabilities of their audience. In a perfect world, advertisers would only promote products and services that truly benefit the consumer in a positive, life-enhancing way. Is this possible? No, because even the most well-intended advertiser will sell a product into the wrong hands. Another impossibility that factors into perfecting advertising is the inability to discover all the nuances of humanity coupled with mass marketing. It can’t be done: marketing relies on stereotypes to sell products on a wide-spread scale. Like Twitchell mentions in his article “What We Are to Advertisers” he writes: “Mass production means mass marketing, and mass marketing means the creation of mass stereotypes” (192). Perhaps to perfect advertising is to remove it from its own definition; to advertise is to brand the consumer, to manipulate our capacity to create meaningful connections between our endless systems of symbolic action. It is also difficult to define a moral compass because I recognize my own intricate involvement in the system of consumerism. It feels very inescapable. I felt this acutely when reading Twitchell’s breakdown of the types of consumers: actualizers, experiencers, achievers, etc. This paradigm breaks down so called individualism to mere patterns of behaviour controlled by our need for meaning and establishes a place more prestigious or unique than our neighbours (coworkers, friends, family, etc.).
The more I think about what moral compass or rules advertisers should live by, the more complicated I find the network of participants in the advertising world. From a semiotic or rhetorical standpoint, especially a postmodern one, the process of persuading and selling is a basic way to analyze how we create meaning. The corruption, perhaps then, isn’t in the advertisement of any given product, but the choices the individuals who read the messages make. I don’t mean to say this as a cop out for really creating a system of rules for advertisers, rather, I believe the power that advertising has is completely fuelled by its consumers. No matter how persuasive Coca Cola is, it is our own individual decision to prefer it over Pepsi, as the study showed in Sandra Blakeslee’s article: “...when the same people were told what they were drinking [who had originally chosen by taste when the brand was unknown], activity in a different set of brain regions linked to brand loyalty overrode their original preference” (198). I think the word loyalty is an interesting word to associate with brands, because it is more often associated with relationships. But the bonds that we create (bonds signifying meaning) with products give us value. If this is innately true of our nature, that we need the value that comes from the bonds we create, then maybe this isn’t always a bad thing. Therefore, advertisers should be primarily seeking to create product-consumer bonds that create higher levels of positive value in their purchaser. If a company is honest and serving a product that is to the utmost benefit to its demographic, then let them use the most rhetorically apt means possible to them. The rhetoric is not the problem by itself. Everything in moderation, right?