Ethical Marketing: Resources

As Halloween approaches, don’t let scary marketing practices haunt your sweet ethical marketing campaigns. Treat consumers with respect and instill brand trust all year. The Center for Ethical Marketing warns against these five ghastly marketing practices and offers tips for handing out ethical marketing treats:

Global marketers and data providers are celebrating the announcement and impending launch of the long-awaited Swiss-U.S. Data Privacy Framework (DPF) to replace the former Privacy Shield, which was invalidated by the courts in 2020. The Swiss-U.S. DPF will go into force on September 15, 2024, and follows the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework which was enacted in July 2023.

The ANA Center for Ethical Marketing is dedicated to advancing ethics and accountability for our members and the industry while safeguarding advertising and marketing freedoms. Our comprehensive self-regulatory enforcement program offers education, tools and compliance services for ethical marketers and consumers. Key offerings include DMAchoice, ANA DPF Dispute Resolution and the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA).

To promote a common set of rigorous standards and solutions for ethical marketing, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) developed a new comprehensive marketing ethics framework, the ANA’s “Ethics Code of Marketing Best Practices.”

What ethical risks and issues come along with using AI (Artificial Intelligence) in marketing?

The ANA Center for Ethical Marketing is committed to advancing an ethical marketing ecosystem. Our mission is clear: to promote accountability, protect advertising and marketing freedoms, and build consumer trust. This ethics alert focuses on the need for companies and organizations to instill consumer trust and meet the consumers where they are by honoring their marketing preferences.

As concerns over data security and consumer privacy continue to grow, marketers are confronted with a unique challenge: how to engage audiences effectively while respecting their privacy and remaining in compliance with regulatory legislation across geographies.

Consumers are likely to believe that the texts received are legitimate and from a trusted source. Unfortunately, consumers have been inundated with so-called unwanted “robocalls” and “robotexts” over many years.

Facebook, Instagram, and the other traditional social media giants are past the apex of their popularity. To move forward effectively, marketers need to understand how we ended up here, and what people are seeking from their digital lives in 2024.

Experimenting with generative AI should be controlled and guided by clear and transparent policies, which are sorely lacking. Only 22 percent of companies have generative AI policies, and only 21 percent have an AI ethics policy or responsible AI principles, according to a recent survey.

The ANA’s Chris Oswald discussed the ethical and legal aspects that revolve around artificial intelligence, and what to consider when applying the technology into content and business processes.

The ANA's latest report on ethics compliance reviews the types of consumer marketing ethical inquiries involving direct and digital advertising, including privacy, that were processed by our ethics team and Committees in 2023.

In this session, get an update on a range of things ANA is working on in the ethics space including an Ethics Code, which covers how to ethically market in 2024; DMAchoice, ANA’s data hygiene tool; and ANA’s cross-border compliance mediation service, ANA DPF Dispute Resolution.

Self-regulation and ethical marketing are at the core of building consumer trust and loyalty. This ethics update series focuses on key consumer marketing issues to highlight the ethical standards of applicability and to assure best practices are communicated and followed.

The generative AI market is growing rapidly and is estimated to increase from $40 billion to $1.3 trillion by 2032. Generative AI refers to artificial intelligence that learns the patterns of content created by people and uses that information to create new content, such as music and videos. Generative AI is touted to boost efficiency, improve customization, and expand creative expression.

Nancy Smith of Analytic Partners shares her perspective on the challenges marketing leaders face with the speed of change, how new innovations influence consumer behavior, and how brands can leverage AI as a potential solution.

In 2023, the Global CMO Growth undertook an important research initiative with Oxford University and the Institute for Real Growth to help elevate how the business community understands and values marketing, brand building, and creativity in driving growth.

Intellectual property and copyright concerns are among the thornier issues that marketers and agencies are grappling with as generative artificial intelligence (AI) becomes a force in the ad business. Procurement can play a key role asking vendors about their technology capabilities and how those technologies or models were trained. At the same time, marketers should be encouraged that some generative AI vendors are providing assurances that their products are free of copyright concerns.

What ethical risks and issues come along with using AI (Artificial Intelligence) in marketing?

The ANA recently released the latest edition of its Ethics Compliance Report, covering January through June of 2023.