Ethics in Marketing: Recent Episodes
Mikhail Myzgin
A podcast for marketers who strive to become more ethical professionals. We discuss all aspects of ethics in marketing. We examine marketing tactics and tools, and unearth ethical issues. We explore questions like: how can we recognize ethical grey areas? What does it mean to be an ethical marketer? And how do we translate ethical awareness into ethical action? This podcast brings together interviews with marketers, academics, business leaders, ethicists, and authors.
In this episode, Mikhail and Harriet talk about a highly complex area of advertising and problematic content on the web. This conversation was recorded before the recent events at Twitter when unpredictable actions related to content moderation policies started to create a lot of anxiety for brands, and brand safety became a popular topic. We discussed the relationships between hate speech and disinformation and the advertising industry, how companies inadvertently fund problematic content on the internet, and where brand safety fits into this picture.
Harriet is an activist, working at the intersection of advertising, climate change and misinformation. Her role at Media Bounty focuses on insight gathering and climate misinformation across a range of groundbreaking clients and projects from electric vehicles to green finance.
She co-founded The Conscious Advertising Network with Jake Dubbins of Media Bounty in 2018 and has since seen it gain international recognition, work with the UN, and grow to over 150 members from Virgin Media O2 to Accenture Interactive. She’s a former Mozilla Fellow, working with Consumers International to map the opportunities and impacts of AI enhanced advertising, globally.
Harriet Kingaby on LinkedIn -- https://www.linkedin.com/in/driescuijpers/
The Conscious Advertising Network -- https://www.consciousadnetwork.com/
The 7 CAN Manifestos -- https://www.consciousadnetwork.com/the-manifestos/
In this episode, Mikhail and Luiza talk about the role marketing and advertising play in the data privacy ecosystem, the other side of narrow targeting available to marketers on advertising platforms, the ethical implications of marketing activities built around data collection, harms to individuals and society produced by neglect of privacy, how to do marketing while respecting privacy, whether privacy can be a selling point, and more.
Luiza graduated in Law from the University of São Paulo, completed her LLM at Tel Aviv University, and is currently doing her Ph.D. at Tel Aviv University on privacy and fairness. In 2020, she was awarded by the President of Israel the "President's Scholarship for Excellence in Science and Innovation" for her Ph.D. research, and in 2021, she received a Westin Scholar Award from the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP). Luiza is the founder of The Privacy Whisperer, the largest independent privacy publication on the internet. You can follow her daily posts about privacy issues on Linkedin and on Twitter.
In this episode, Mikhail and Dries talk about a big grey area of persuasion techniques in digital marketing, specifically in social proof, personalization, advertising, and nudging. We also discuss the current state of regulations on all these topics, the legal bottom line marketers must keep in mind, and more.
Dries is a lawyer and coordinator of the digital economy at the Consumer Division of the Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets. He has nearly 20 years of experience as an enforcement official in numerous economic sectors. He set up ACM’s Behavioural Insigths Team and managed the team for the first years. In recent years, he has worked at the OECD on consumer policy. He is a co-author of ACM’s Guidelines on the Protection of the Online Consumer.
Dries Cuijpers on LinkedIn -- https://www.linkedin.com/in/driescuijpers/
Authority for Consumers and Markets -- https://www.acm.nl/en
Guidelines on the protection of the online consumer mentioned in the episode can be found here -- https://www.acm.nl/en/publications/guidelines-protection-online-consumer
In this episode Mikhail and Ravit talk about potential risks that AI marketing tools present, ethical use of AI tools in marketing, AI in content creation, how to evaluate the ethics of an AI tool, how to avoid making the world worse inadvertently, how to market an AI solution ethically, and more.
Ravit Dotan's website -- https://www.ravitdotan.com/
Ravit Dotan on LinkedIn -- https://www.linkedin.com/in/ravit-dotan/
In this episode Mikhail and Alice talk about ethical marketing, where manipulation in marketing originates, the use of psychology in marketing, boundaries between persuasion and manipulation, limitations to ethical marketing set by capitalism, marketing utopia, and more.
The Ethical Move -- https://www.theethicalmove.org/
Alice Karolina's website -- https://www.alicekarolina.com/
Alice Karolina on LinkedIn -- https://www.linkedin.com/in/alicekarolina/
In this episode Mikhail and Colin talk about dark patterns, different types of dark patterns and how marketers can recognize them, why companies use dark patterns, how to engage less in this type of manipulation, what to do if your company requires you to implement something you consider to be unethical and more.
Colin M. Gray is an Associate Professor at Purdue University in the Department of Computer Graphics Technology and Associate Professor (by courtesy) in Learning Design & Technology in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction. They are program lead for an undergraduate major and graduate concentration in UX Design. They hold appointments as Guest Professor at Beijing Normal University and Visiting Researcher at Newcastle University.
Colin holds a PhD in Instructional Systems Technology from Indiana University Bloomington, a MEd in Educational Technology from University of South Carolina, and a MA in Graphic Design from Savannah College of Art & Design. They have worked as an art director, contract designer, and trainer, and their involvement in design work informs their research on design activity and how design capability is learned. Colin’s research focuses on the ways in which the pedagogy and practice of designers informs the development of design ability, particularly in relation to ethics, design knowledge, and learning experience. Their work crosses multiple disciplines, including human-computer interaction, instructional design and technology, design theory and education, and engineering and technology education.
Resources:
colingray.me
darkpatterns.uxp2.com
everydayethics.uxp2.com
Episode 0. The goal of this episode is to give you some context and tell you what to expect from this podcast.