ABSTRACT

Advertising is routinely described as unethical, trivial, untruthful, and exploitative. Ethicists and regulators have used many approaches to understand advertising’s effects on various populations and which messages and strategies should be classified as ethical or unethical. This chapter reports results of a qualitative study investigating how people describe advertising in three different categories: sexualized ads, ads showing dangerous behaviors, and public service announcements promoting prosocial behaviors. We find that people interpret advertising meanings and appropriateness in very different ways and suggest that a more nuanced understanding of advertising ethics can emerge from a “mutualist” approach to meaning making. Instead of assessing ad messages from a rules-based standpoint, we ask the question “how do ads mean” as individuals interpret the persuasive messages they see.