Ethics in advertising (The examination of tv commercials in Turkey from the perspective of ethics)

In spite of the informative, persuasive, and entertaining sides of TV commercials as a indispensable component of enterprises; nowadays the ethic problems they cause have also been discussed frequently. TV commercials are questioned in different perspectives as a focus point of these ethical discussions and their negative impacts on consumers have been worked on.In this study, ethical problems related with TV commercials are focused on as they are mostly chosen by advertisers because of their advantages. These problems are classified under fourteen headings and in addition to such problems, which are mainly discussed in literature such as deceptive-misleading, comparative, subliminal advertising; the ethical problems such as virtual advertising, irritating, associative commercials, which rarely take place in literature, are also mentioned. Thus, almost all the problems that the consumers encounter are discussed on ethical basis with the relevant examples from Turkish TV commercial samples.Regulation of TV commercials in Turkey is also accentuated in this study by mentioning how the consumers can be protected against TV commercials and two types of regulation system such as self-regulation and administrative regulation are undertaken.During the field study, the attitudes of the consumers to the ethical problems they are confronted with in Turkey are evaluated by undertaking demographic properties of these consumers, their time interval of watching TV, whether they watch or do not watch TV commercials and their reactions to these commercials. With this study in accordance with the result of this research, making proposals to the advertisers and advertising agencies is aimed in order to decrease the viable ethical problems related with TV commercials.