Opinion

Ethics is the only thing marketers should be talking about right now

If all the breathless 2023 predictions pieces are to be believed, this will be a watershed year for marketing in many ways, writes Storyation's general manager and head of content and strategy Andrés López-Varela.

Whether from within or without, our profession seems to be under intense duress as the varied changes in consumer behaviour, moral expectations and corporate governance sparked by the pandemic, morph into something more specific for us.

Take, for example, the imminent reckoning for influencer marketing, or what seems like crunch time for environmentally vandalous advertising, the arrival of retail media on the scene as perhaps the first true threat to mainstream media in decades and, of course, ChatGPT (‘Skynet’s grandpa, as a mate of mine refers to it) and everyone alternately pretending to be totally ok with and losing their mind about it.

Source: Microsoft

Regardless of the predictions and trends we’ve been reading about for the past few months, there seems to be a golden thread running through what awaits us in 2023: ethics.

Ethics can seem like an arcane concept for us marketers (surely we don’t need to worry about the impact of what we do, right?), but it’s for that reason ethics is worth talking about. Nothing else – no generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), no video on demand, no content creator marketplaces – really matters unless we come to grips with the need to be more ethical in our profession.

Since the pandemic, both my team and I have been more aware of the ethics of what we do. We have a strong journalistic gene running through our agency’s DNA and with that comes a healthy degree of scepticism, a strong commitment to the audience and, of course, the truth.

That’s not to say ethics wins the day, all the time. Sometimes we get it right, sometimes we get it wrong.

So, how do we practise ethical marketing? It’ll mean something different for everyone depending on your industry, seniority and the nature of your business, but I think there are four collective actions we can take to bring ethics into focus in what we do.

1. Let’s slow the hell down when it comes to AI

Sure, it’s a tool that can make our lives easier and maybe fatten our profits , but this technology is embryonic. I mean, if Google can’t get its AI chatbot right and Microsoft’s chatbot is indulging in dark fantasies, are we really ready to let this thing loose on the millions of people our marketing reaches on a daily basis? Just because it is the new shiny thing, doesn’t mean we marketers need to jump in feet first.

2. Let’s push back on class bias

Yes, we’re more gender and ethnically diverse than ever, but our industry continues to have a severe class bias problem. Collectively, we have a lot of ordinary privilege, and while there’s nothing inherently wrong with this, it can lead us to make lazy, and potentially harmful, decisions. This privilege underpins our industry’s class bias and unconsciously directs us to create work and opportunities for people and audiences ‘like me’, marginalising those whose lives, values and aspirations are different to our own. We can start to tackle this potentially thorny issue by educating ourselves about what ordinary privileges we might have and how we might be able to use these to help others. Ultimately, we want to create work for our audience and expand the opportunities in marketing for people with a range of identities and backgrounds, and those people don’t always fit the ‘Sydney Eastern Suburbs’ mould.

3. Let’s get serious about climate change

I’m talking ‘show, don’t tell’ serious; not greenwashing, not recycling in the office and definitely not falling over ourselves to get business certifications. This looks different for all of us; for example, those agencies relying on revenue from clients with a mixed environmental record have, I think, a special kind of responsibility. At a minimum, we must stamp out bullshit, performative climate-related marketing and push stakeholders or clients to invest marketing dollars in positive climate change initiatives.

4. Let’s start phasing out our reliance on the tech giants

I get this sounds kind of nuts and a boil-the-ocean kind of task, but we have an opportunity to start this work in 2023 given the trends in media spend and consumption. The truth is marketing spend has fuelled the rise and transformation of Meta, Google, Twitter et al into the mostly ethically barren hellscapes they’ve become. I know we can’t turn this tap off suddenly, but let’s cool our jets on the investment in these mediums, use them primarily to discover audiences and bring them to our owned channels. Once regulation catches up with these guys, we can have another conversation about the role they play in our activity and wider social impact.

Regardless of the tech and the trends and, frankly, even what the economy does, we must make ethics and the practice of ethical marketing a central pillar of our industry’s agenda. We must stop making the easy choices, the cheap choices or the same choices.

Instead, let’s make the right choices, because, as marketers, those choices can have a massive impact on people’s wellbeing and the collective future of our world. Let’s not screw that up.

Andrés López-Varela is general manager and head of content and strategy at Storyation.

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