Lost in Regulation: Ethical Breaches in Indonesian Advertising through a Systematic Literature Review
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.46961/mediasi.v7i3.2171Keywords:
Advertising Ethics, Indonesian Advertising Ethics (EPI), Niklas Luhmann’s Social Systems Theory, Systematic Literature Review, Ethical ViolationsAbstract
This article examines how criticism of advertising has been discussed in Indonesian communication scholarship and how these critiques can be mapped onto the Indonesian Advertising Ethics (Etika Pariwara Indonesia/EPI). Using a systematic literature review, this study analyzed 123 peer-reviewed journal articles published between 2004 and 2023 in SINTA-indexed Indonesian communication journals. The search used the keywords “komunikasi pemasaran,” “marketing communication,” “advertising,” “advertisement,” “periklanan,” and “iklan,” followed by manual screening of titles, abstracts, and full texts. The findings identify ten dominant themes: exploitation of gender and sexuality, discrimination and social representation bias, power domination and capitalism, advertising camouflage and blurring boundaries, commodification of religion, visual manipulation and hyperreality, inappropriate advertising for children, misleading information, exaggerated claims and puffery, and intrusive digital advertising. These themes can be mapped onto EPI provisions concerning women, gender, pornography and pornoaction, religion and culture, halal claims, children, misleading language, product benefits, hyperbole, embedded advertising, digital media, privacy, and database practices. However, EPI has been explicitly and systematically used as an analytical framework in only a limited number of studies. Most articles criticize advertising through semiotics, gender studies, cultural studies, political economy, media sociology, or discourse analysis without operationalizing EPI as the primary framework. Drawing on Niklas Luhmann’s Social Systems Theory, this article interprets this pattern as limited resonance between professional self-regulation and academic observation.
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