Monitoring Advertising in the Digital Age: A Challenge for Advertising Ethics

According to John Keane's Monitory Democracy approach, in recent years the new digital environment has created new possibilities for political citizenship, including monitoring and scrutiny to the centers of economic and political power. This means communicational landscapes like social media are promoting and increasing the public debate. This paper argues that this phenomenon is also observable in Advertising, for which provides the distinction between normalized and citizen monitoring, as well as between subvertising and citizen media activism. Finally, this paper presents the ethical challenge that accompanies this process, by questioning the understanding of Advertising as a persuasive monologue.