(M2) Legal, Ethical and Moral Issues

Legal, Ethical and Moral issues are some of the main factors to take into account when creating an advertisement. This is because it develops how an audience will react to your advertisement, and whether it is actually suitable to be streamed on videos. The set of rules that advertisement would need to abide has been set by ASA (Advertising Standards Authority), BBFC (British Board Film Classification), and OFCOM (Office of Communications).

ASA - Companies would need to be aware of a set of rules made by the ASA (Advertising Standards Authority) for advertising in the UK. This means that they will need to keep the advertisement inside these rules, meaning that they should make the advertisement suitable for all ages, and it must not offend anybody for any reason. The ASA have set a group of legal, and ethical rules that advertisements would need to stick to. This is created so that advertisements do not use anybody's content without permission, and making any content that could come off as inappropriate or insensitive towards an audience. This will cover things such as how gender and minorities are treated within the advertisement, or within the company.

OFCOM (The Office of Communications) - OFCOM are the main regulatory body for media broadcasting. This is because they are the regulator for most types of streamed media, including media such as film, TV and radio. The job of OFCOM is to regulate these types of media, and make sure that they are sticking to all necessary rules and laws. This means that they will checkoff content is entirely appropriate, and also check if it will offend minorities, or larger groups. OFCOM are less involved with advertisements such as the audio visual promotion we are creating, however, their set of rules and laws still apply to advertisements, so it is worth considering them. Being a YouTube advertisement, this will need to be broadcasted. This means it will also need to stick to all broadcasting regulations, regardless of when and where the videos are shown.

Legal Issues - 

Misrepresentation -

In this advertisement, we should make sure that all of the content and music used is recording using the shown guitars. This is to make sure that we are no misleading an audience into thinking the product is better than it is, or into thinking than the product is different to how it is shown. The way we can do this is by making sure that all of the claims in the video are true, and the footage recorded is of the right guitars, and the sounds we hear are produced from those guitars.

This also means that none of the audio should be altered in post. This could be used to add more sound, or make it sound crisper. All of the footage should be the guitar and the guitar only, with no pedals or anything to affect the sound. If in some case we have to use post effects, we will need to make sure this is known to the audience, by adding a voiceover or a text overlay onto the advertisement to make sure that we are not misleading.

Copyright  - 

Copyright will be another factor we will have to take into consideration. This is the usage of other people's media or real property within your campaign. Copyright is the intellectual property of people online, and gives them the freedom to choose what happens and who has the rights to their property and work online.

In our radio show we will need to make sure that any media that we use we have permission for. This will not be a large issue but will be taken into account when we use things such as music and graphics. All of our footage for the advertisement will be filmed by us, so we will own the right to use and the intellectual property of that footage. However, if there are any products or brands visible that would not want to be in the advertisement we will need to censor them.

Ethical Issues - 

Racial (Ethical) - 

This is a more interesting subject for our video. At our disposal we have three people working on this promotion that can act in the video. We are all white people which may raise any problems included with the video. however, as long as we do not make race a specific focusing point or problem in our advertisement, we will not pass any ethical issues. This can be solved by only focusing on the guitar, and not the person in the video.

This can also be bypassed by using long sleeved clothing. This puts less of a highlight on the race of a person and more on the product in the advertisement. This problem is a large one in modern media issues, so we would need to make it very sure that we do not offend any minorities and will make sure that our advertisement will not have this issue at any points.

Gender (Ethical) - 

In our promotion, the focus is on both genders at an equal split, and has no aim towards one gender more than another. This means that our advertisement should be very easy to keep out of this problem, as long as we make it clear, or make no sway towards one gender at any points of our advertisement, unless for very specific reasons such as quiz questions. This is good as it means that our audience will be happy with how we target and treat both genders equally, and we should not generate any ethical issues here.

In order to make sure this is not possible, we use one gender but did not make it a key element, and keep our promo very neutral in terms of who we show on the video and how we present that person in the advertisement. There is a lack of females in the guitar market however, but this is something that we cannot change. We could try and combat this by using a female actor in the advertisement.

Offence (Ethical) - 

Offence has many categories that it could be interpreted as. The most known category of this is offensive language. This can be anything from swearing to slurring, and is not appropriate in an advertisement, or any element of media that is streamed to all ages. This is easy to dodge, however, as all we need to do is make sure that there is not language that will be of offense to anyone, which can be done with a simple double check.