the role of ethics in marketing/advertising

An assignment from a marketing ethics class I'm currently taking...

How do ethics play a role in the marketing and advertising strategies of a company?

The predictable answer is that, ideally, the role of ethics in marketing and advertising is to enable the creation of a trusting, mutually-beneficial relationship between a company and its customers – a relationship that ultimately drives a company’s financial success by reciprocally delivering value to customers.  However, the question as framed implies that ethics is a separate, detachable component – an optional subset, in essence – of marketing and advertising. This historically persistent distinction has been the underlying factor in the operations of companies who, in an economic utilitarian manner, have evaluated business decisions on the basis of consequences for financial growth (and the accumulation of personal wealth) rather than societal, ecological, and humanitarian considerations. Money becomes the end result of a business process rather than one of several possible means of achieving greater goals.

By attempting to retrofit ethics on an existing business model, a meta-ethical quandary is created whereby the use or rejection of ethics in itself becomes a cost-benefit proposition. Asking how ethics can play a role in business thus misconstrues ethics in which right actions should be undertaken precisely because they are right actions and not because of any instrumental value they can offer independently of their rightness. (Obviously, the challenge is defining what constitutes a right action at the outset.) When instrumental value becomes the prime motivator, with or without the disincentive of punishment, the ethical quality of a business or individual can only be as strong and durable as the methods used to enforce morally appropriate behavior. This is evident in the cyclical nature of business in which ethical lapses with catastrophic results prompt more stringent regulations and oversight only to loosen over a subsequently uneventful period of time. Regulations are then repealed or weakened, often under the guise of promoting economic growth, thereby setting in motion yet another catastrophe that prompts, once more, demand for stricter regulations. For an example, consider recent events in the banking industry.

This is not to reduce the question merely to a problem of virtue ethics in which the challenge entails defining moral character, although that is a critical problem. Designing ethical social structures that nurture moral behavior while discouraging immoral behavior is certainly an important consideration. In this respect, structuring marketing and advertising strategies within a specific and measurable ethical framework is reasonable and desirable. However, if we accept that thoughts influence behavior then it is necessary to question the psychological segregation of ethics (e.g. through our use of language) from other human activities such as business, especially considering how easy it is to forego moral actions when economic survival is threatened. A better question, then, is:  what kind of business practices can be derived from any given ethical perspective? Also: what are the defining qualities of moral agency in an economy that uses business to further ethical goals rather than the reverse? Finally: how do we organize society, and the business practices within it, to enable individuals to develop the ethical skills necessary to participate in an ethical economy?

Whether ethics is interpreted as the ground of a business practice or its shepherd, there is no question that its role remains to serve as a necessary arbiter for a company’s marketing and advertising strategies. The reasons for this are, in practice, both intrinsic (the right thing to do in-and-of-itself) and instrumental (financially beneficial). Nevertheless, the ultimate role of ethics should be not to have a role but to instead blur the distinction between itself and other activities whether economic, social, or interpersonal.

Smoke but No Fire in Scott’s Prometheus

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, but the point should be debated in regards to Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s return to science-fiction almost 30 years after Blade Runner. A splendour to behold, from the panoramic views of desolate Icelandic terrain to the imaginary landscape of a planetary moon with the unromantic designation of LV-223, Prometheus achieves the epic visual presentation one associates with the grandest of science fiction and fantasy films. Every scene is lavish with thoughtful design, whether in the muscularity of the titular spaceship, the organic morphology (both biologically and technologically) of the alien race dubbed “Engineers,” or the creature design. Dariusz Wolski’s cinematography is rich and atmospheric. Performance-wise, Michael Fassbender just about carries the film in his pocket in his role as an inconsistently characterized android with a duplicitous agenda and ambiguous relationship towards humanity.  It’s all beautiful smoke, but where’s the substance?

Some fuss has been made about the film’s narrative ambiguity. Though certainly not perplexing in the mode of Stanley Kubrick, the ambiguity is earned fairly. The narrative offers a credible sense of mystery by leaving obscured much about the Engineers except for facts that directly impact the literal aspect of the story, and using whatever answers are offered to set up new questions. Yes, the invitations has been issued for a sequel, but the film accomplishes enough that whatever direction the series takes – in a potential follow-up possible titled “Paradise”  – will build on Prometheus instead of charting the same territory.

So, no, a lack of answers is not the reason why the old syllogistic adage is wrong and the film lacks fire, a mortal wound in a film so intimately vested in the myth of Prometheus’ theft from the gods. It’s the lack of science and scientific reasoning, in a film ostensibly framed as science fiction, that reduces Prometheus to a false alarm. As if Scott and his screenwriters, Lost’s Damon Lindelhof and Jon Spaihts, had never read science fiction let alone familiarized themselves with how scientific research is conducted, Prometheus gives us a scenario of often astonishing incompetence.

Beginning with the scientists, Prometheus gives us a geologist unable to tell the difference between natural and artificial formations, a biologist without curiosity about alien life forms until the moment the narrative demands a grisly sacrifice, and assorted crew members who serve no discernible purpose. What little scientific method there is consists of reading computer screens. The only facsimile of science occurs at the beginning of the film, when archaeologists Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Halloway (Logan Marshall-Green) discover a cave painting  that would make Erich von Daniken proud, and even that is little more than the sort of stumbling around any amateur adventurer can do.

Next comes the method, of which is there is none. One would expect an expedition to an unknown, potentially dangerous planet to involve strict protocols to preserve the researchers’ safety while uncovering new data using the best tools 2093 has to offer– robot probes, procedures for handling life forms both sentient and otherwise, extensive documentation – that is, a methodical process of investigation. But despite the offering of gadgets like robotic surgical pods and little robot spheres that can map terrain on their own very quickly, this is a primarily a film that gives us an idiot removing his helmet the moment his sensors detects breathable air, and a scientist who rejects weapons among the equipment manifest on account of being on a “scientific expedition.”

Do Scott and co really imagine that this is how a trillion-dollar voyage to another planet would be carried out, by a defenseless spaceship filled with unarmed scientists who blunder around? What are we to think of a script that succeeds in having characters get lost in relatively simple tunnels despite having access to maps and guidance from the ship? I half expected Scott to cut away to the two technicians from Cabin in the Woods, gleefully punching buttons on a console to orchestrate a sacrificial ritual for the appeasement of an elder god audience. No such luck; the only explanation for a poorly conceived scenario populated by incompetent and often outright stupid characters stems from the unmarried marriage counselors (to borrow a phrase from Charles Schultz) who wrote the script.

The film’s most notable act of intellectual dishonesty, as if implausibility wasn’t enough, is that while the script asks big questions it settles for small, unexamined answers. There is no debate or discussion about the questions, the answers, and the significance of either beyond the banal reevaluation of human origins as extraterrestrial in nature. Prometheus doesn’t feature scientists flinging evidence in support or refutation of the various scientific hypotheses that arise from the archaeologists’ discovery, or arguing the implications of challenges the body of evidence that favoured human evolution from primates. That the film stops short of providing definitive answers is not the problem, provided that we can share in the characters’ thrill of puzzling out the mystery and pondering the possibilities. Problematic is that the film’s protagonist, played by Noomi Rapace with strength and vulnerability worthy of Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley, demonstrates a markedly anti-scientific mode of reasoning: in the absence of evidence, her conception of knowledge is informed by what she chooses to believe. Instead of accepting the unknown as unknown, she emphasizes the film’s equivocation of truth and wishful expectations, with the only nod towards the false equivalency emerging when the expectations are fulfilled in a predictably brutal fashion.

In regards to the film’s implications in terms of the human condition, Prometheus makes the mistake of forcing a simplistic religious perspective on a non-religious paradigm of human origins despite the ill fit. As if centuries of theology, philosophy, and science have no bearing on the characters or issues, all we get is the view that the created somehow must derive the meaning and purpose of their existence from their creator. Imagine the problem, then, when discovering that the creator is not the burning bush but aliens with sinister secrets. But again, don’t expect the characters to engage in any meaningful debate as one would expect from people confronted with an awesome, unsettling revelation. The extent of the film’s shallowness extends to the wasted casting of Guy Pearce and Charlize Theron, both of whom play important characters that could have imbued the narrative with significant momentum had they been given the necessary screentime to dramatize the film’s subtextual concern with the fear of death.

There are irritations, such as the easy exploitation of female anatomy for body horror – a predictable extension of the not-so-vaguely sexual terror implicit in the phallic-shaped creatures, the oral penetration method of infection, and unnatural procreation that marked the Alien films. Yet Scott is a masterful director, so the objection only comes after the scene has passed and the mind can assert itself over the harrowing, visceral queasiness of the expedition inevitable succumbing to horror. The same can be said of the film as a whole; grandly cinematic and relentlessly captivating during its running time, but whose effect is too ephemeral to leave anything behind other than intellectual bankruptcy. Beautiful smoke from chilly embers.

A housekeeping note: For anyone wondering about the connection with the Alien films: there is indeed a strong link which marks Prometheus as a prequel of sorts. The film’s revelations provoke a reevaluation of the Alien mythology, but since it has no bearing on the narrative of any of the Alien films, the link isn’t a necessary one to understand.

a sad conclusion about doctor who from series 6

Series 5 of the popular Doctor Who revival, hereafter to be referred to as New Who, ended on a slightly ambivalent note; enthusiasm for Matt Smith’s hyperkinetic embodiment of the 11th doctor, frustration with his companions (i.e. Amy Pond), and an exhilarating feeling of disappointment with Steve Moffat’s vision as showrunner. Exhilarating disappointment  – an oxymoron? Hardly. Watching Series 5 –and, now, Series 6 – is like eating candy and eventually recognizing that it has no nutritional value whatsoever. The sugar rush is a thrill for a while, but eventually must yield the way to more substantive and mature appreciation. Or rejection.

Perpetuating the flaws that have marred New Who since its inception – notably grandiose plotting with delusions of narrative coherence – Series 6 adds in a few of its own, beginning with an amplification of a significant irritation from Series 5: the relationship between Amy Pond and Rory Williams. Thankfully, we have finally moved past Rory’s status, in Amy’s eyes, as side-dish to the Doctor’s main course. Yet after a season in which Amy has the hots for everyone’s favourite Time Lord only to jettison it all in a season-ending marriage to Rory, the coupling still fails to convince. We accept it only because the plot requires us to accept it, and because Arthur Darvill is the series’ unsung star performer in a role that blends the sensible and the vulnerable with hefty doses of bravery and bad-assery.

Far crueler to the Doctor’s companions than the conviction of their marital status is their relationship to the Doctor, namely, as appendages. Although the Doctor cares greatly for them, there is never the sensation of a two-way relationship in quite the same way the David Tennant’s Doctor enjoyed with Donna Noble or Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor with Rose Tyler. Perhaps the most honest acknowledgment comes when – spoilers! – the Doctor leaves Amy and Rory behind with the recognition that he was selfishly feeding off of Amy’s fangirl adoration. Much in the same way New Who feeds off the adoration of its uncritical fanbase.

All that could be dismissed as glitch rather than aggravation provided New Who’s fundamental structure, wobbly at best under Russell Davies’ guidance, had improved with Moffat in charge. Yet despite Moffat’s ability to crank out plots that take advantage of time travel’s convolutions, the plots remain stubbornly prone to magical resolutions and pandering scenarios. Telling stories from the school of plotting that demands escalated stakes, the writers long ago reached the dead end of positing the ultimate stakes – the erasure of reality itself – and repeating the same universe-destroying outcome as the challenge the Doctor must overcome.

More fundamental still is the show’s refusal to embrace its science fiction character, preferring instead to dwell in the arbitrary logic of fairy tales. Result: high concept stories are reduced to mere melodrama or yet another monster-of-the-week scenario, with the concept providing a backbone nobody cares to notice is broken. Consider “The Girl Who Waited,” an episode set on a planet quarantined from a deadly and incurable 24-hour disease. Through a medical facility capable of sustaining co-existing time streams running at different speeds, the dying can stretch their final day to last the lifespan of their loved ones. Into this fascinating idea comes a medical facility incapable of distinguishing human biology from other biologies, and an army of robots ostensibly intended to provide medical care but, in true Who fashion, display a sinister shark’s array of needles in their heads. (The xenophobia that is rampant in Doctor Who, manifested in an endless parade of cool but ultimately malicious entities is an on-going drag for a series that otherwise celebrates adventure and the search for universal wonders.) While the drama inherent in trapping Amy in a different timestream from Rory and the Doctor is compelling, the cavalier treatment of the episode’s core concept underscores how the writers are willing to jettison narrative integrity in favour of manipulating audience emotions. When magic is draped in science-fiction trappings, the cognitive dissonance that results doesn’t lend itself to credible narratives. Concepts are thrown around like wet noodles at a wall, sticking only out of sheer production will power and not because any of it actually makes any sense.

This is on par with the show’s disregard for continuity and consistent worldbuilding, in the sense that each plot idea – each new villain’s assault on Earth – seems to exist without consideration of past episodes. Hence, we have a planet Earth whose core was formed around a malevolent race of half-humanoid half-spider beings, which evolved a race of underground-dwelling reptilian humanoids, and subsequently was subject to an occupation by Silence so hidden that even past incarnations of the Doctor were unaware of it. Add in Torchwood, and we are given a race of ridiculously powerful fairies who also inhabit the Earth. Nevermind the fact that apparently all these beings have never interacted; Doctor Who’s anything-goes approach to worldbuilding, quirky in Classic Who but amplified in New Who, has reached the critical mass of absurdity.

The sad conclusion: New Who is no longer skilled fiction, if it ever was, but fan fiction – a comic book soap opera that panders to audiences rather than demonstrate artistic integrity. I’ll keep watching, if only because there remains a certain infectious entertainment value to the show, but I can’t say I have much respect for it. Not when there are other shows, like Merlin, Eureka, Sanctuary…that manage to have excellent characterization, clever show premises, and a solid grasp of narrative storytelling.

an invitation to stay at the Cabin in the Woods

The setup sounds like the start of a groaning joke: 5 attractive teenagers walk into a forest one day to spend the night in an isolated cabin…In the reels of a typical horror film, it’s a formula for slaughter. But Cabin in the Woods springs from the efforts of  frequent collaborators Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard, and the result is a curious hybrid; a horror film for both fans and antagonists of horror fiction populated by interesting characters and monsters wittily drawn from the genre bestiary. As Whedon tells Total Film,

It’s basically a very loving hate letter…On some level it was completely a lark, me and Drew [Goddard, director] trying to figure out what the most fun we could have would be. On another level it’s a serious critique of what we love and what we don’t about horror movies…The things that I don’t like are kids acting like idiots, the devolution of the horror movie into torture porn and into a long series of sadistic comeuppances. Drew and I both felt that the pendulum had sung a little too far in that direction.

And so, polishing up Whedon’s star after the mess that was Dollhouse, here’s a film focused more on character and plot than on lingering sequences of gore and suffering framed by flimsy scenarios. The clever premise – the film’s setup is really part of a bigger plot orchestrated by mysterious technicians in a high-tech underground facility – simultaneously exploits and undermines the narrative mechanics of horror/slasher films. Of course we are being played, but we are not being played for fools. Evidence: an ending that would amount to the usual cheap twist of the knife if Whedon and Goddard didn’t build up to it and grant their characters the awareness to be active participants in the plot’s resolution. Instead of falling victim to the infamous last genre shot demonstrating the illusory nature of safety, the survivors face (with as much calm as one could reasonably expect) consequences that emerge from their own deliberate choice in an essentially no-win scenario. 


Although events brim with playful irony, the narrative doesn’t escape the elemental cynicism of horror fiction in which humanity is not deemed worth saving. Cabin in the Woods differs from the usual horror, often bleak to the point of banality, by justifying the characters’ cynicism and bringing us to the unstable point that we can sympathize and, perhaps, uncomfortably agree with their climatic decision. That Whedon and Goddard do so with effective black humour makes the film that much sharper in its dismantling of horror film expectations.


Yet the film’s critique of horror’s formulaic destruction of innocents for audience entertainment is ultimately confined to the form and presentation of horror fiction rather than its substance. Far from being a deconstruction of the genre, Cabin in the Woods owes more to a clever bon mot at a cocktail party than a searing academic indictment. There’s no denying the film’s entertainment value, a quality helped immensely by violence modulated to avoid exploiting the characters’ suffering, and the point is well taken that horror as a genre has of late forsaken storytelling in favour of a pornographic obsession with bodily destruction. Missing, however, is a critique of horror’s metaphysical structure and fundamental assumptions. Beyond the question of why horror is fodder for entertainment – especially given how horror fiction is, by nature of being fiction, entirely optional – horror’s fear of death, mistrust of knowledge, and narrow focus on the survival of the strongest and most violent –  are never called into question. Forget, then, the horror genre’s pessimism as manifested in the predictable trope ending, the aforementioned last shot that reinforces a perspective that good can never truly stand its ground against evil, let alone triumph. It is in these elements – violence as entertainment joined with a fear of death and the unknown – that the horror genre should be critiqued. 


As it is, we are guided into cynicism through scenes such as the film’s most jarring, when the technicians obliviously celebrate a victory with their colleagues while the television screen behind them shows one of the teenagers enduring a savage, relentless beating. The callousness of the technicians, consistently revealed through the jaded, smarmy way in which they manipulate the teenagers to their deaths, makes it hard to feel much sympathy for their goals, however worthy. The end result is a film whose most notable strength is successfully putting audiences in a visegrip, with sympathies torn between the teenagers and the technicians.


Interestingly, there is the seed of a counterpoint to horror’s essential character – if you want to remain spoiler free, beware. After revealing that the teenagers’ death is America’s ritual to stave off the return of apocalyptic elder gods, and the world’s last hope after the failure of other rituals around the world, the glimpse of Japan’s ostensible “failure” remains unexamined for the insight it could offer. When we consider the violence intrinsic to the American ritual – the teenagers are to be slaughtered according to the technicians’ engineered scenario, and their option for survival is to resort to violence in return – the gentleness of the Japanese scenario is striking. In it, a group of schoolgirls defeat an evil ghost reminiscent of Samara from The Ring, not through a violent exorcism or bloody sacrifice, but by cheerfully placing the ghost’s spirit to rest in a frog. The ritual presumably fails because the ghost is supposed to kill the girls to satisfy and entertain the sleeping elder gods. What Cabin in the Woods fails to accomplish as a critique is questioning horror fiction’s tendency to reduce humanity to either victims or perpetrators of evil, with violence as the only mediator between suffering and the causes of suffering. Alternative methods of interpreting and confronting evil, as suggested by the Japanese ritual, are never considered.


For all that Cabin in the Woods amounts to criticizing politicians for their clothes but not their policies, it remains a brisk, engaging riff on horror storytelling. As strange as it might seem, the film is the closest I’ve ever seen a horror film come to being a crowd-pleaser. 

the dim shadows of tim burton's "dark shadows" - THE FRONT PAGE ONLINE

Whenever Hollywood adapts a television series, fan base reaction follows a familiar alliterative pattern of despair, dismay and disdain. Despair at Hollywood’s lack of originality. Dismay at the potential ruination of a beloved show. Disdain for the studios’ mercenary motives. The list of failed adaptations is long and certainly aggravates the allergy to adaptations. But the conclusion shouldn’t be a moratorium on future attempts. In principle, a feature film offers the creative opportunity for modernizing and distilling television series that, however loved, might be otherwise dated or bloated from content parceled out in episodic format. Such an adaptation, done properly, could serve equally well as a gateway to its inspiration while offering its own parallel narrative. That most adaptations fail stems from the simplest of incompetentcies: An inability to grasp a television series’ essential character and confusing pandering for storytelling. Despite Hollywood’s repeated failures, the dream stubbornly remains that somewhere, sometime, a filmmaker will take a much-loved television series and give it a worthy cinematic treatment. 


This adaptation of the cult gothic soap opera Dark Shadows, alas, is not that worthy effort...


Read of the rest of my review of Dark Shadows at The Front Page Online.