Ethics in Marketing Mikhail Myzgin

In this episode, Mikhail and Sylvie talk about gendered marketing – its evolutionary origins, how it can both benefit and harm consumers and brands, the ethical challenges it presents, and ways for brands to navigate them. Sylvie Borau is professor in marketing specializing in consumer psychology and applied ethics.

Data is the cornerstone of digital marketing. When it comes to ethics, it's arguably the most discussed topic -- collection and abuse of data, privacy, tracking, and so on. Stephane and I talk about these problems, but we also talk about what it means for businesses to adopt ethical practices. Is ethical marketing also more profitable for companies? And what if a more ethical approach reduces profit? These questions are not easy in marketing in a real-world environment, where profit is often the only goal and the pressure is strong.

We, marketers, walk around and look at everything around us from a marketing perspective. How this works and how that works. One type of marketing that is very prominent is nonprofit. But I didn't realize the full extent of messiness in this "niche" until I spoke with Tim.
What kind of marketing is acceptable? Is it any different from quote-unquote usual marketing? Is it OK to A/B test images depicting war victims? How do people feel about spending donations on marketing? How do you balance transparency in marketing communication? There are many ethical concerns around marketing in the nonprofit sector and this is the topic of today's episode.

In this episode, Mikhail and Louis talk about ethical problems presented by the new technology used in marketing -- virtual reality, augmented reality, and the metaverse. In some way this is a bigger question of relationships between marketing and any new technology. If there are no rules on how new technology can be used in marketing, you know that some companies will use it in a predatory way. In many cases, such use of technology is very profitable. And other companies have no choice but to do something similar, or they will be out of business. This also applies to marketers on the individual level. If an unethical practice is widely spread and accepted in our profession, it makes it extremely hard for an ethical marketer to avoid doing it, which creates an internal psychological conflict.

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.

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.