Digital platforms raise new ethical questions for marketers

Ethical behavior has long been a concern for responsible marketers, but in a digital age, just what constitutes ethical marketing has become a moving target.

Mark Bartholomew, a professor at the University at Buffalo School of Law and author of Adcreep: The Case Against Modern Marketing, recalls that in the analog age, most ethical concerns centered around how competitors treated each other, not how they treated their customers. "A big concern was not trashing your competitors or framing comparisons in ways that might generate ill will," he says. "Today, that concern is still there, but there is less of it. Competitive advertising is a little more cutthroat than it was pre-2000."

Responsible marketers adhered to other ethical guidelines in the analog age, of...

Not a subscriber?

Schedule your live demo with our team today

WARC helps you to plan, create and deliver more effective marketing

  • Prove your case and back-up your idea

  • Get expert guidance on strategic challenges

  • Tackle current and emerging marketing themes

We’re long-term subscribers to WARC and it’s a tool we use extensively. We use it to source case studies and best practice for the purposes of internal training, as well as for putting persuasive cases to clients. In compiling a recent case for long-term, sustained investment in brand, we were able to support key marketing principles with numerous case studies sourced from WARC. It helped bring what could have been a relatively dry deck to life with recognisable brand successes from across a broad number of categories. It’s incredibly efficient to have such a wealth of insight in one place.

Insights Team
Bray Leino

You’re in good company

We work with 80% of Forbes' most valuable brands* and 80% of the world's top top-of-the-class agencies.

* Top 10 brands