I believe that expecting advertising to serve a larger cause is a misplaced demand. I read an article on Mxmindia.com about the recent Bajaj Pulsar advertisement, which called it wrong for not being gender-sensitive, and I initially disagreed. My first reaction was simple: if an advertisement is within the law and the regulatory framework, and does the job it was created to do, what more should we be asking? After all, advertising is not a social reform movement. We are paid to sell, create differentiation, get noticed, be remembered and persuade. As an advertising professional, if cigarette or vaping advertising became legal again tomorrow and I had the account with a clear brief to promote smoking, would my professional Dharma demand that I do it? Honestly, yes.
But there is another way to look at the Pulsar film that brings us to a larger question of Advertising ethics. The new Pulsar communication is especially created to mark 25 years of an iconic advertising legacy. As the creative team from the advertising agency said: ‘Creating the next chapter of a film that people already remember is a very different creative challenge. The audience knows the setup, so familiarity becomes the device: establish instant recognition through visual cues and rhythm, build anticipation and then surprise the audience by taking the story somewhere that belongs to the present’. In that sense, the new film is not necessarily trying to make a statement about how society should be; it may simply be using an old cultural memory and giving it a contemporary turn. That makes the criticism less straightforward than it may initially appear.
But a line from the article made me rethink: “The minimum legal or regulatory threshold cannot become the maximum ambition of advertising.” I find it hard to disagree. There is a difference between asking whether we can do something and asking whether we should, and ethical advertising has always had to live somewhere in that space. We would expect at atleast big brands and advertising agencies, as custodians, to treat legal compliance as a baseline and place greater emphasis on honesty, responsibility, and the foreseeable impact of advertising.
The question for advertising ethics is how far that responsibility should extend.
Should advertising ethics force it to become an agent of cultural change? Should every piece of communication be judged against evolving ideas about gender, relationships, family, masculinity, femininity and social behaviour? If so, we are asking a commercial profession to shoulder a responsibility that perhaps belongs to society at large. Advertising can certainly influence culture, but culture also influences advertising, and sometimes an advertisement is merely holding up a mirror rather than prescribing what the world ought to look like. Perhaps this is where advertising ethics needs to distinguish between influence and responsibility.
There is also a practical reality that we should not conveniently ignore. Advertising professionals are increasingly judged by sales, leads, conversions, engagement and measurable business outcomes; the romantic idea of the advertising person as a cultural architect has steadily given way to the harder economics of survival.
When the brief says sell, differentiate and win, is it reasonable to expect the person creating the work to simultaneously become society’s moral custodian? If the communication is legal, truthful about the product, and does not deliberately exploit or deceive, perhaps the professional has fulfilled the brief.
Yet the Sanatani idea of Dharma complicates the argument. Dharma is not merely about following a rule; it is about understanding one’s duty within a larger order and a greater good. The Mahabharata shows Krishna urging Arjuna beyond his immediate reluctance, because duty cannot be understood solely through the narrow question of what he personally wishes to do. Perhaps advertising needs a smaller, secular version of that mirror: not merely “Is this legal?” but also “What does this communication contribute, reinforce or normalise?”
Does that not give advertising too much moral importance?
Advertising is persuasion, and persuasion needs drama, exaggeration, provocation, humour and memorability. If we insist that every advertisement become a carefully sanitised representation of the ideal society, we may eventually produce communication that is impeccably responsible and utterly forgettable.
The consumer is not a passive recipient waiting to be morally instructed by a thirty-second commercial; audiences interpret, reject, laugh at and sometimes challenge advertising in ways the creator never anticipated.
Perhaps we also need to stop taking advertising and ourselves too seriously.
Osho often spoke about how seriousness can become a burden, whereas playfulness creates space for life and creativity. Advertising without playfulness would be a rather sad profession. Its strength lies in taking an ordinary commercial proposition and making it interesting enough for someone to stop, look and remember.
Am I here saying “everyone does it”, thereby reinforcing precisely the Indian trait we so often complain about? It is the same argument the taxi driver uses when overtaking from the wrong side or running a red light: “Sahab, sab karte hain.” We know instinctively that the argument is hollow; just because everyone does something does not make it right. So perhaps “everyone does it” cannot be a defence for advertising either, even if it remains a very convenient one.
Perhaps I therefore remain diplomatically in the continuum somewhere between the two extremes. The law should define the boundary, professional ethics should make us examine what lies beyond that boundary, and the commercial objective should not be apologised for because selling is what advertising exists to do. We should be careful about deliberately deceiving, exploiting vulnerability or causing obvious harm, but we should also recognise that advertising cannot be expected to solve every cultural contradiction that society itself has failed to resolve.
After all, if everyone does it, it does not necessarily make it right. So, the decision remains very individualistic-driven.
But if nobody notices it, we may have produced something wonderfully ethical and completely useless advertising. And that is not the aim.
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NOTES TO SELF
I believe umpteen other creative expressions could have linked it with the iconic old Pulsar. They could have been within the extended dharma people demand of advertising. I would believe they were discussed and discarded. Moreover, it is wrong to think that the recent Pulsar ad was an easy way out. It must have been a conscious decision, and I respect it. Maybe I am yet to evolve to a larger Dharma- but first let me take care of my karma.
