To talk about ethics in advertising is said to be a contradiction in terms -- especially when advertising is understood to be associated with all things negative.

Somebody put the "list of sins" together. Advertising, he says, "is deceptive and manipulative; it is intrusive, irritating, offensive, tasteless, insulting, degrading, sexist, racist; it is loud, obnoxious, strident and repetitive to the point of torture; it is a pack of lies; it is a vulgar bore." The actual list is, of course, much more exhaustive.

What often not gets mentioned though is that advertising is central to the capitalist economy without which it cannot function. If, going by the definition of Marx, capitalism means "an economic system which promotes private ownership of the means of production", the producers will compete for better ways and innovative means of selling their products. And that is where the role of advertising comes in.

Critics of advertising think that what is being sold to the consumers is not the product of the highest quality, but a product of ‘imagined quality’. Technically then, this is more a critique of capitalism that is dependent upon a competition among producers for manufacturing products of varying quality and there is no way to take these products to the consumer except through advertising.

It is here that the question of ethics emerges, beginning with whether advertising recognises the difference between man’s rational needs and his desires. But didn’t capitalism set aside all such distinctions to start with? The habit of buying thus created was understood as "consumerism" which is as central to capitalism as to advertising.

So what do ethics of advertising signify in a capitalist society?

Once advertising has been accepted as a natural corollary of production, different societies do evolve their codes of ethics, at the level of advertisers, governments and the media. Then there are regulators that ensure the codes are followed and respected. Apart from profitability, social and environmental responsibility form the basis of these codes.

Ethics, however, remains a subjective term and one society’s norms may not hold good in another; likewise, one society’s norms at one time may change at another time. Someone rightly points out how times changed for countries allowing cigarette ads and banning condoms to doing exactly the opposite in a matter of a few years.

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The definition of ethics also varies from a society’s commitment to the kind of capitalism it wants -- thus social democracies would have stricter rules for advertising aimed at children (including no advertising for them) while others like the United States see no harm in doing that.

The definition of ethics changes from company to company, too. In a country like Pakistan, for example, that is the first thing to strike you in the morning when you look at how six different newspapers decide to place the same advertisement on their front or back page.

Talking of Pakistan, there do exist many sets of ethics and the consumer may be forgiven for thinking they are violated more often than they are followed. There is a regulator, too, in the shape of Competition Commission of Pakistan which is a source of occasional good news.

To conclude, advertising, as much as capitalism that springs it into action, is guilty of making people question their self-worth, making them dissatisfied with their lives and inculcating in them a sense of inferiority. These all being a corollary of cut-throat competition, no amount of ethics can take them away from advertising.