 In this part of our course we delve into the ethical dilemmas a professional in persuasive communication can face. Persuasive communication is focused on communication processes that are intended to achieve specific persuasive goals. There is a central question. How and under which conditions can communication be used as a strategic tool to inform and to influence people? This question is highly important for marketing professionals in order to influence people to buy a brand or a service, but also for communication in order to promote or prevent health-related behavior. In this clip we mostly focus on marketing. When we talk about influencing people, marketing communication is a major issue. As a marketeer or advertising professional there is a continuous struggle to do the right thing from an ethical point of view while making money at the same time. We can all find countless examples of being pitched by a product, a service or idea that we don't really want or need. And there are other issues. First, in advertising often the whole truth about a product is not taught. False promises are made or misleading information is given about the value of the product. The negative consequences of drinking behavior or the side effects of aspirin, for example, are not explicitly mentioned in advertising campaigns. And maybe more innocently in print and television campaigns we often see much more food-based shampoo or detergent being used and is needed to accomplish the best results. Second, frequently vulnerable groups such as children are reached with ads for sweets or games. They are not able to distinguish between commercial goals and entertainment goals and are therefore easily persuaded by commercial parties. Third, often emotions and fear appeals are used to create awareness and to persuade the public. These fear appeals are created for the target audience of a product, but they are also seen by other more vulnerable audiences. In this case there is not only the chance of a vulnerable audience being affected but bystanders too can be very sensitive to certain appeals. Fourth, subliminal advertising consists of flashing a single frame in the middle of an apparently harmless ad. Too short or too hidden to be generally perceived actively but which supposedly has big effects in our subconscious. There is a very famous example of research about this way of advertising conducted by James Vickery in 1957. He inserted the words, eat popcorn and drink Coca-Cola in a movie to study the effects. Although Vickery proposed that these subliminal messages significantly increased product sales, it was later suggested that the results of this experiment had been fraudulent. And fifth, with cookies, marketeers are able to track our online behavior and with beacons, marketeers are able to track our offline behavior and create personalized or targeted ads to reach us in the most effective manner. This can be seen as highly invasive and concerns about privacy are increasing. With these issues of course, questions are raised about an ethical perspective on marketing and advertising. Is advertising by definition unethical or is it possible to develop ethical ways of marketing, honest and fair methods to persuade people? Let us consider a major ethical issue in marketing in our effect to answer this question. A growing marketing phenomenon since the last decade has been sponsored content, also known as product placement. The practice of placing brands into non-advertising media. Product placement is a form of marketing communication in which the message, the sender and the precise intention behind a brand seen in a television show or a movie, a blog or a computer game are often implicit. Since sponsored content is embedded in non-commercial media content, the source and persuasive intent of the message is not obvious. This makes it harder for viewers to distinguish between editorial and commercial content. Let us consider two possible ways to approach this recent phenomenon in marketing practices. From a deontological approach, the focus should be on the motives for your action and that you are being guided by rules that apply universally. From this perspective, you may think that it is wrong to persuade people without being warned that there is a commercial goal behind the entertaining content. Program makers, media owners and brand owners should therefore at least make their product placement strategies explicit to audiences. From a teleological approach, you should primarily evaluate the outcomes of your behavior. In particular, if you use a utilitarian perspective, you basically think about the greatest good for the greatest number of people. From this approach, product placement in a television show should not be harmful. After all, most of the audience, at least if they are adults, recognize commercial intents. Their primary goal is to be entertained by the content of the show or the movie and the underlying commercial goals are not that important. Furthermore, the sponsoring makes it possible to offer the content to the audience for free. As a result of this ethical discussion in marketing, sponsorship disclosures on television have recently become obligatory in the European Union as well as in the United States. I hope that we have unraveled some of the issues with regard to marketing and that you will start thinking about the ways people are persuaded during the day.