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...