Apr 23, 2024

The Ethics of Surrogate Advertisement

Surrogate advertisements are advertisements featuring products that are legal to be advertised, but is intentionally crafted to benefit products that are not legal to be advertised. The best examples are the ads for water bottles, music CDs and sodas to promote alcoholic brands, and ads for pan masalas to promote tobacco products.

Surrogate advertisements are simply ordinary advertisements to the eyes of the law, and therefore are legally sound for the following reasons:

• the product featured in the ad is a product whose promotion is allowed.
• the intend of the surrogate advertisement, which is to cascade the exposure to some other products, cannot be irrefutably proven unless the promoters admit it themselves or they are caught red handed of doing so (highly unlikely).
• it is technically possible, although not likely, that a company is truly promoting a product that is featured in the ad.

But, we can identify surrogate advertisements through a combination of insights.

• Does the product being advertised bring more money than the money spent on advertising? If yes, look for other insights. Please be careful that this alone is not a hint for surrogate advertising. Almost all products have to be promoted in the beginning with more money than than it generates to the company.
• Is the company also involved in the production, marketing or sale of products whose advertisements have been prohibited?
• Where are the resources of the company spent more: on the products they advertise, or on the products that are prohibited to be advertised? Eg: how much resources is put into the "music business" or "water business", and how much is put into the alcoholic business?
• Is there a product evolution to the products being advertised as per the market? Eg: releasing compilation music CDs in 2024 doesn't go well with the market.
• Do they produced enough of these products as per the market demand and as per the company's potential? Eg: Few thousand bottled water made by a 100 crore company when hundreds of crores (or hundreds of millions) of bottled water is in demand goes against common sense.

Surrogate advertisements are merely a tool, and tools by themselves are neither good nor bad. Whether surrogate advertisements are morally sound depends on the product that reaps its benefits. The examples stated earlier promote harmful products through surrogacy.

However, there is no doubt that surrogate advertisements violate the spirit of law since the product it is indirectly advertising has been prohibited by the government. Whether this violation is justified or not depends on the character of the product indirectly advertised and the consequences it causes. In the case of tobacco and alcohol, they are known to cause cancer and liver ailments. Their surrogate advertisement actually promotes bad health among the public.

Why not ban the product altogether? Whatever the health effects are, a person has the right to administer a drug on his or her body, so long as it does not directly harm others. Therefore, businesses around such products must exist. What we must do is ensure that these businesses are not be carried out by the ecosystem coming together and conspiring¹ to persuade the unknowing public to consume it.

Therefore, while companies making these products have a business reason to exist and serve, celebrities promoting these products through surrogate advertisements have no justification. They are promoting a harmful product and they do so only to fatten their financial assets.

On this backdrop, it is imperative to mention the decision that Shri. Sachin Tendulkar took to not endorse tobacco and alcoholic products through surrogate advertisements, despite the filthy amount money that was offered to him. His stand is truly a manifestation of being a good human being — that which his father advised to him.

Many celebrities may have also turned down such offers for ethical reasons; only that it isn't publicly known. There may be celebrities who endorsed surrogate products and have since atoned for it, doing work within the affected community. All these people deserves a pat.