Lack Of Advertising Ethics And Its Countermeasures

Since the reform and opening-up policy, advertisement plays an important role in transmitting information, promoting sales and activating the market, but it still has some problems such as the lack of ethics. With the advance and improvement of socialist market economy mechanism and the deep development of advertisement, it seems more important to study advertisement from the respective of ethics and establish a system which can affect and restrain the advertisement behaviors.The article summarizes the existing ethic lack problem in the advertisement through some serious cases of false advertisement, aberrant celebrity advertisement, vulgar advertisement, erotic advertisement, discriminatory advertisement and unfair comparison advertisement. The article argues that the harm mainly lies in weakening the regulating power of the ethics, hindering the development of advertisement and socialist market economy and resulting in the decreased good faith and distortion of mainstream values. After the analysis of the reasons, the article argues that the problem mainly lies in not adapting to the market economy and the profound social reason is the flexibility of the basic social order. There are some other reasons such as psychological expansion due to economic development and lagged operating systems. At last the article gives some suggestions about how to improve the advertisement ethics: we should try our best to guide and regulate advertisement behaviors and activities and promote all-round sustainable development in advertisement by establishing the ethics system, perfecting the regulation system, strengthening the supervise system, realizing the self-discipline and making most of its educational function.