Ethics in PR Consultancy

During my time at Go Communications I was exposed to the Vertical Team’s diverse range of corporate clients and the campaigns run on behalf of their clients. One of their clients included the Malaysian Tobacco Industry. Through my regular task of media monitoring and discussions with the Vertical team, I was made aware of the rising issue of the manufacturing and distribution of illegal cigarettes in Malaysia.

 There was a lot of focus in the media on  government authorities and the Tobacco Industry cracking down upon this counterfeit industry and the persons responsible for producing these illegal cigarettes.  Illegal cigarettes are sold at a price considerably less than those sold legally, but have even more serious repercussions on your health than a regularly produced cigarette. The unfortunate reality with this surge in attention and effort to deal with the organized crime groups responsible for producing the cigarettes, are that the authorities generally are more successful in arresting those at the distribution end of the process, (who make only a fraction of what this illegal industry is profiting) whilst the major persons and organisers continued to evade punishment.  One of the Vertical Team’s assignments on behalf of the Malaysian Tobacco industry was to contact and have as many media persons as possible attend a court case dealing with the arrest of a man who was distributing illegal cigarettes. I found this quite an interesting response to the whole situation. In Australia, as a society, I believe we are appropriately anti-smoking and anti the smoking industry. Obviously illegal cigarettes are also a problem, but I am not convinced that the court case would have evoked the same profile reaction in the Australian public, as the Vertical Team were hoping to evoke from the Malaysian public, by maximizing the court case’s media coverage in order to exploit the case in Malaysian Tobacco’s favor.  I found the campaign very confronting and extremely questionable in regards to where it fell ethically. The scenario made me consider my own ethics and the ethics which are supposedly in place to govern PR practitioners. Having no experience in a professional consultancy previous to this internship, I become immediately aware of the importance of ethics within the public relations industry and the potential challenges related to maintaining your own ethical beliefs when employed in a consultancy which predominately deals with large corporate clients.  In reality, I don’t think I would have what it takes to work in a consultancy which had clients such as the Tobacco Industry. I don’t believe I would be capable of compromising on certain situations like the Vertical team was expected to do.

I would be really interested to hear if anyone else experienced similar scenarios during their internships?