In a modern capitalist society, ads are ubiquitous; criticisms of advertising are nearly as common. Some ethical criticisms concern advertising as a social practice, while others attack specific ads or advertising practices. Central to ethical criticisms are concerns that ads subvert rational decision making and threaten human autonomy by creating needs, by creating false needs, by developing one-sided narrowly focused needs that can only be satisfied by buying material products and services, and/or by appealing to genuine and deeply rooted human needs in a manipulative way. Asecond sort of criticism is that ads harm human welfare by keeping everyone dissatisfied. At a minimum, ads try to make us dissatisfied with not currently having the product, but many ads also aim at keeping us permanently dissatisfied with our social positions, our looks, our bodies, and ourselves. Advertising has been blamed for people today being neurotic, insecure, and stressed.
Business ethicists have traditionally either considered advertising in general or divided ads into information ads, which are ethical as long as they are honest, and persuasive ads, which are always problematic. However, recent literature on advertising ethics considers the division of ads into informative and persuasive to be entirely inadequate because it fails to consider separately the various persuasive techniques that ads use.