Privacy Issues Under Targeting Advertising

Advertising in the modern day has developed alongside the advent of business ethics as a scholarly and academic practice. As the ethical environment of business has seen a surge in study and discipline, advertising has undergone even more intense scrutiny and discussion. Though advertising and criticism is no new marriage as it has been under the microscope since its takeoff in the 1930s, developments in both approach by advertisers and its critiques has lead to an even heavier discussion than before. The focal point of this critique revolves around the notion of consumer sovereignty and how it theoretically has been altered by the ad. The aim of this paper is to address this very subject and

The average United States Citizen views about 5000 advertisements a day (Johnson). Advertising is everywhere. Billboards on the way to work, ads on the internet, and paper products such as magazines or newspapers display a sale or a promotion of a good or service. Usually, the ad will give a brand or company name, and uses the product’s merits to draw the consumer closer. This has grown exponentially as advertisements in media in 1970 were estimated to be 500 a day, a ten percent increase in the last 48 years. (Johnson). This is due to the rise of technology, as the computer has become a household gadget within the new millenium. These advertisements are meant to give a synopsis of the product or service’s purpose, quality, and efficiency. If a consumer views 5000 advertisements in a single day and assuming the commercials do not repeat, 5000 goods or services are introduced. With more options to choose from in such little time, the consumer has a harder time differentiating the quality and perhaps necessity of the product. The marketers rely on the quick, impulsive decision making of consumers. With the misleading nature of many infomercials or radio broadcasts, the people of American society are bombarded with constant propaganda, thus making seemingly harmless promotions more potent to filling industries’ pockets and lessening the common population’s

For many years, advertisers had tried to find out an efficient way to understand their target markets and the customers. Before the age of information system, it was difficult to track their customers efficiently, and therefore they were like swimming in the dark when they dealt with the customers. They could only make the very broad target customers and send them advertisements through newspapers, television, magazines, or other media. However, this traditional method of sending advertisements to everybody that the companies could reach was not working well, since it ignored the demands of the receivers. However, along with data mining, it brings a business revolution to the whole world.

Each day we are bombarded with advertisements from a plethora of corporations in every waking moment of our lives. Advertising agencies have become so advanced at what they do, that often times we may not even realize we are being advertised a product. This raises an interesting ethical dilemma over a certain type of advertising: persuasive advertising. Philosophers, economists, and business professionals have debated over whether or not persuasive advertising is an immoral violation of the autonomy of consumers. While not all forms of advertising are in and of themselves certainly immoral, persuasive advertising is particularly reprehensible due to the fact that not only does it manipulate our unconscious desires of which we are completely unaware in order to sell a product, but it also routinely leads us to act against our own best interest, thus overriding our autonomy.

To establish a good relationship with customers, employees, and business partners, privacy and trust are the most important things. Today, number of threats challenging businesses every day to keep up with the privacy of business, customer and employee. For example, identity theft, hackers, information thieves. It also includes carelessness, lack of training and criminal activity. Many advertisements that appear on the screen are mostly targeted to public tastes and interests. Because mostly every website tracks your online activity. You probably have noticed that many advertisements that you see online are targeted to your tastes and

Have you ever wonder why the advertisement boxes on the internet always related to our interests? This is because the advertising companies know about our preferences and have access to our personal informations. They use the method called “Behavioral Tracking” to invade our privacies by secretly tracking our online activities and histories. Each time we surf the internet, the advertising companies observe our behavioral and build our profiles according to our interests and preferences. This process is done without our consents, which result in invading our personal rights, privacies, and informations. Behavioral tracking is a worldwide issue that need to be fixed as soon as possible. There are several ways to stop this problem included the

Advertising techniques range in complexity from the publishing of simple, straightforward notices in the classified-advertising columns of newspapers to the concerted use of newspapers, magazines, television, radio, direct mail, and other communications media in the course of a single advertising campaign. From its unsophisticated beginnings in ancient times, advertising has burgeoned into a worldwide industry. In the U.S. alone in the late 1980s, approximately $120 billion was spent in a single year on advertising to influence the purchase of commodities and services.

Such targeting is referred to as personalized advertising and has changed from paper surveys designed to determine consumer demographics and preferences to large-scale physical (loyalty card-based), online and mobile data mining applications (Finn, L. Finn, & Wadhwa, 2014).

An advertisement is a way for a person or group of people to market themselves or a product to other people. An advertisement can be as small as a pin with someone’s name on it or as big as a one-minute commercial during the Super Bowl. In ancient Egypt advertisements were made using papyrus and posted at markets. Fast forward 3,000 years and advertisements are still a large aspect of human life. With new technology, the world advertisement has grown. It is no longer a poster on the wall. Every day people view

Advertising has grown massively due to the expansion of technology and this has transformed the advertising industry. Organisations are spending heavily in advertising to differentiate their brands and cut throat competition among advertising companies is a priority. However, in this race for standing out, advertisers and marketers might overlook the ethical policies.

In order to collect data on consumers using the internet, businesses include cookies, web beacons, e-tags, and various other tools on their sites (“Getting to know you”, 2014). These tools allow businesses to track consumers across the internet while collecting data on them. A website not only includes these tools from the business that created the site, but also from third-party data brokers. Data brokers collect the same information about users as the business that owns the site. Additionally, data brokers

Marketing is an area that affects the companies greatly. Marketing can change how people see a brand, it can create a positive or negative perspective of the brand that is why marketers need to be careful how they launch new advertisements and promotions. Many thinks that marketing has a big deal with ethical issues which most of the companies try to get rid of these problems because they would like to be more transparent and more appealing to the customers, but this is not the case for all the companies because as we can see when we check the internet we get bombarded with a lot of advertisements that we do not even have an interest on them. However, many researchers found ethical issues with marketing, one area that researches found the greatest problem is when marketers survey people to find if they are interested with the brand or their products. Akaah and colleagues state on their research, “In an effort to meet the client’s need for accurate and reliable data, a researcher might be less than candid with respondents about the intent of a research study in order to avoid biasing their responses.”

Commercials attract customers by making them aware of the products, services or brands available by a particular company. Advertisements are trying to convince customers to use their products. Advertisements accomplish this by using pathos, ethos, and logos. Social media advertising is a tremendous way to increase exposure and traffic for your business, create loyal customers, and generate leads and sales. After carefully studying the Facebook advertisement, I have come to the conclusion that Facebook would be the best company to help me obtain the advertising needed to promote my AV business, since Facebook is currently the social network King. Advertising on Facebook helps you find new customers and build lasting relationships with them. Facebook uses pathos, ethos and logic by explaining how liking various Facebook pages you will receive updates from them keeping you more connected to the things you want. Facebook is the most reliable source to get information spread to people quickly, and Facebook logo is everywhere you go.

Advertisements have taken many forms over the all of history. They have taken in the form of newspapers, billboards, magazines and television commercials however as Kay (2001) says that when it comes to online advertising to Barbara Kaye and Norman Medoff online advertising is a quite recent phenomenon. According to Collins (1999), in 1994 the first banner ad was made by hotwired.com. And since then the advertising phenomenon has exploded in every possible website and social media outlet in existence today. You even cannot watch a YouTube video without see an advertisement pop up in front of you before your video begins. Fortunately, some times you have the option to skip almost most of the advertisement if you do not want to see it but for the most part in every other part of the Internet you cannot escape advertisements. Even education websites have advertisements everywhere for plagiarism checker to books stores’ advertisements cannot be escaped what ever you do. Anyone might legally wonder why this is this the case and the underlying answer to that question is economics which is going to be one of this essay’s parts and its association with advertisements. We will then take a look on banner ads and how they affect advertising especially with regard to another forms of advertising that have permeated the internet since the beginning of online advertisements was back to 1994. After we take a look at the evolution of advertisements, we will take a look at how

Advertising is a tremendous and powerful way of providing silent information as to how consumers should interact and present themselves. From the ethics class, we realize that the messages help us to see the meaning and possibilities in the things we purchase. It also helps consumers to liberate the direct meaning that lie below the surface of the products. For example, the Volkswagen advertisements have turned the automobile company into a social statement. Advertising has become a daily culture and companies are bombarding us with messages every day. Therefore, advertisements are increasingly influencing and changing the behavior and cultural conscious of the public. Therefore, it provides a higher quality of good by identifying manufacturers, creating the need for manufacturers to maintain a degree of quality enables companies to rollout new products and protects industries from the control of special interest groups and government due to democratized information.