Ethics is defined as the 'standards of conduct that indicate how one should behave based on moral duties and virtues'. With that said, as long as a PR agency puts its staff through a "Fit and Proper Person Test", like those conducted in English football whenever a new owner takes over a football club, they will be fine and all can only be rosy when the staff come together with organizations/clients to formulate a PR plan...or will it?
Ethics has always an gray area when it comes to judgment - who is right or wrong and what are the guidelines where judgment is based upon?
Take for instance a recent PR stunt in Singapore which incurred the wrath of the general public. Singapore Post, the nation's designated Public Postal Licensee, 'vandalised' its own mailboxes across the island to promote an event centered around the theme of the Youth Olympics Game (YOG). This act of 'creative art' - where a shady-looking hooded individual went around mailboxes and spray-painting graffti on it - was derided by the publics of Singpost, a la the Singapore population.
Comments such as 'terror inducing', 'disregard for the law' were one of the many opinions felt by irate Singaporeans who felt that this PR stunt was a large dent in SingPost's moralistic image.
Eventually, SingPost's CEO, later on in a press conference to announce SingPost as a proud sponsor of the YOG, had to apologize to the Singaporean public for failing to be as clear as crystal to the authorities about this viral marketing campaign.
My personal thoughts on this saga/scandal (whichever side you've looked at it) is that SingPost were in no fault as ownership of the mailboxes were theirs and that SingPost was well within their rights to do whatever they wanted to their mailboxes.
So who's right and who's wrong in this saga? And what guidelines do we measure the Course of Action SingPost took in promoting the event through the vandalism?
The readings probably got it spot on with this quote: "There are not necessarily any single right answers to ethical questions" and that "Different ethical systems give different assessments of the ethics of an action"
A huge contrast to the SingPost was another viral marketing campaign, shown by my lecturer Tanya Wilson, that fashion label Marc Ecko executed in the States. The PR agency handling the label's project threw a video, seemingly, of Air Force One being 'tagged' with graffiti by a Marc Ecko fan. Sure it promoted widespread questioning but certainly not the negative perception like in Singapore.
SingPost, along with the PR agency in question, probably felt that this was the best way of promotion but unfortuanetly, what works in the West doesn't equate to similar success in the East.
In conclusion, while SingPost might not have been legally nor morally wrong in this sense, they probably failed to comprehensively emphatize with the Singapore citizens, their publics, and this is what ethics is about - the need to understand the publics' viewpoint and applying deontology to their actions/campaigns.
I, for one, feel that they were well within their rights and if no one attempts revolutionizingly unorthodox methods of PR and advertising, we'll all be stagnant in this quantum of time and no one will improve..
When that happens, will the public outcry the lack of creativity then?
Terence....OUT!
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Good job in using the SingPost example to understand ethics. I didn't even think of the SingPost incident when I did this week's reading. You are right to say that ethics will always have a gray area, what's wrong to one may be right to another. Well, I guess SingPost is deemed as unethical because the 'deed' was done in Singapore. In our super conservative and rigid society, the act was deemed as vandalism. In my opinion, I didn't see anything wrong with SingPost's viral marketing.. It was new and unorthodox, like what you said. Sigh.. Slowly, Singapore will open up to these new methods of PR and advertising, I hope.
ReplyDelete-Vanessa Charmaine
In my opinion, the issue about ethics is very subjective. But as what Vanessa had mentioned on her blog, perhaps organizations can list out certain behaviours they think are not right and that public relations practitioners should never do. This allows more control over the extent of being unethical and I think it is a really good plan.
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