A Fine Line Between Ethics

SURROGATE ADVERTISEMENTS

Presented By-Shivani Dixit Arun Jindal

BBA-3

INTRODUCTION

1.. Advertisements 2..

Surrogate Advertisements

They provide information and create awareness about the market.

Many times, some advertisements are accused of misleading people. Such instances have been reported in the advertisements endorsing alcoholic drinks and cigarettes.

An advertisement which shows a substitute product in the guise of the real one which otherwise cannot be legally advertised through the print and electronic media is known as surrogate advertisements.

ADVERTISEMENTS

Surrogate means Substitute.Surrogate advertising is advertising which embeds a

brand or product message inside an advertisement which is ostensibly for another brand or product.

For example, a cigarette company might issue public service announcements relating to a topic such as lung cancer, using the company's logo or distinctive brand colors in the ads so that people are exposed to the company's branding without seeing an explicit ad for the company's product.

Heavy advertising is done so that the customers do not forget their liquor & tobacco brands, for which advertisements are banned. Their only objective is to compensate the losses arising out of the ban on advertisements of one particular product (i.e. liquor).

SURROGATE ADVERTISEMENTS

-A New Weapon of Proxy War

Surrogate advertisements took off not long ago in the UK, where British housewives protested strongly against liquor advertisements "luring" away their husbands. The liquor industry found a way around the ban: Surrogate advertisements for cocktail mixers, fruit juices and soda water using the brand names of the popular liquors.

ORIGIN

COMPANIES NAME SURROGATES

SEAGRAMS COMPACT DISCS

MC DOWELLS WATER AND SODA

BAGPIPER WATER AND SODA, CASSEETES AND COMPACT DISCS

GODFREY PHILLIPS BRAVERY AWARDS

RED AND WHITE BRAVERY AWARDS

BACARDI CASSETTES AND COMPACT DISCS

KINGFISHER WATER AND CALANDERS

SMIRNOFF APPLE JUICE

ROYAL CHALLENGE GOLF TOURNAMENTS

JOHNNY WALKER SODA

FOUR SQUARE WHITE WATER RAFTING AND GLIDING

MANIKCHAND FILMFARE AWARDS

WILLS LIFESTYLE APPARELS, CLOTHING ACCESSORIES

Bagpiper.mp4

Mc Dowell's.mp4

Techniques involved in surrogate advertising

• same brand name• sponsoring community events• sponsoring sports teams

TECHNIQUES

Company Year  Ending Ad expensess(in Rs million)

As %age of Sales

McDowell  Mar-08  1,089.00  13%

United Breweries  Mar-08  737  28%

Shaw Wallace  Jun-09  565  7%

Smirnoff  Dec-09  78.1  8%

Bacardi  Mar-09  523  13%

AD SPENDS OF LEADING LIQUOR COMPANIES

1. Can help you to recall brand .2. One can capture a huge market share. 3. Can Increase profit. 4. Can help to compete the competitors.

BENFITS TO THE COMPANIES

There are a number of reasons for companies to use surrogate advertising. One of the most common reasons is to circumvent a ban on direct advertisements of particular products. Many nations have laws restricting alcohol and tobacco advertising, for example, so companies use surrogate advertising to market their products. Techniques used might include advertising another product with the same brand name, sponsoring sports teams ,etc. All of these activities technically do not violate the ban on direct advertising, but they still get consumers familiar with the company's branding.

REASONS

Each day 55,000 children in India start using tobacco, Gutkha the chewable tobacco is aimed at the younger generation of the country. But you may wonder how do these companies manage to reach the minds of this children when they are not allowed to advertise these products.

After the ban the companies opened their doors to surrogate advertisement, an advertisement has the logo or brand of another company advertised within it.

IMPACT ON CHILDREN

The owners of such brands may have spent huge sums of money on these products. If they are worried about ethics in the first place they will not be making such products, but having made and spent several millions on these products they are not ready to let the brand name die. Their contention is that there is a lot of good will associated with the brand. Therefore, they resort to the practice of assigning the name to another non- controversial product which is not an intoxicant

Consumers who are in the habit of consuming the intoxicant product may not react negatively to the other product bearing the brand name of an intoxicant.

Ethical Disturbance

1) making transparent laws banning surrogate advertisements for different products under a single brand names, by amending the Trade Marks Act.

2) asking the electronic and print media to adhere to the advertisement codes and not encourage surrogate advertisements;

3) creating a consumer awareness programme to help people understand the negative impact of surrogate advertisements;

4) adopting strict laws to penalize those companies featuring surrogate advertisements without any real existence of the product;

MEASURES TO CURB THE PRACTICE

Surrogate advertisements are not only misleading, but also false and dishonest in many cases. With surrogate advertising so widespread, this is the moment to tackle the problem head-on.

CONCLUSION