MORALITY & ETHICS
"Is advertising moral? It is part and parcel of the American free enterprise system . . . . I challenge anybody to show any [economic] system that has done as much for so many in so short a time."
Morris Hite, quoted in Adman: Morris Hite's Methods for Winning the Ad Game, 1988, Dallas, TX: E-Heart Press, p. 207.
"Ethics in advertising? Advertising is about as ethical as the American public. About as ethical as you and your neighbors. About as selfish as you and your acquaintances. It has about the same moral standards as the upper socioeconomic strata of society because it is created, approved and paid for by the upper echelons of modern U.S. society. I'll modify that to say that it is a little more ethical, a little more moral, than the upper economic strata of society. Why? Because advertising lives in a fish bowl. It is the most visible of all commercial practices. It has 200 million critics. And no business, no communications medium, no art form (or whatever you want to call advertising), no other enterprise has so many watchdogs."
Morris Hite, quoted in Adman: Morris Hite's Methods for Winning the Ad Game, 1988, Dallas, TX: E-Heart Press, p. 200-201.
"The trade of advertising is now so near to perfection that it is not easy to propose any improvement. But as every art ought to be exercized in due subordination to the public good, I cannot but propose it as a moral question to these masters of the public ear, whether they do not sometimes play too wantonly with our passions."
Dr. Samuel Johnson (1759), English author, quoted in Robert Andrews, The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations, 1993, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, p. 18.
"[A]dvertising is a non-moral force, like electricity, which not only illuminates but electrocutes. Its worth to civilization depends upon how it is used."
J. Walter Thompson agency business pitch (1925), quoted in Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America, 1994, New York: BasicBooks, p. 224.