Ethical Marketing Policy

Huxley are Ethical Marketers

We believe that all marketing efforts should provide genuine value to the target audience in order to earn their attention and their trust.

A rainbow rising from a forested range of hills and rocky peaks

Why Ethical Marketing

Our strategies are based on a foundational belief that marketing should be honest and that marketers should not take advantage of anyone’s personal data. This policy statement lays out the ethical marketing practices we follow at Huxley and the commitments we have made to ensure that our client work meets or exceeds the highest ethical standards of our industry.

We Commit to Honesty in Marketing

Accessibility bleeds into everything we do.  We are committed to absolute honesty in our marketing for our own campaigns and for customers and partner driven projects.

We pledge to not use manipulative patterns or persuasive copy that could confuse and mislead certain users.  This includes:

  • False advertising: exaggerating values and benefits of products and services
  • Fake or doctored reviews and testimonials.
  • Inflated analytics or results when creating messaging for partners or within your advertising.
  • Use of data points in marketing and communications that are not representative of a client’s overall impact.
  • Choosing to withhold negative information or data from the public solely to protect a brand’s image.
  • Using manipulative copy including unrealistic descriptors of the products, services, or impact we are promoting.

Ongoing Project-Based Reflections:

It is easy to claim that our efforts are honest, but we are conscious of how it takes discipline, rigour, and at times internal conflict to ensure honesty in marketing. 

We ask ourselves the following questions during campaign strategy and implementation:

  • Are we clearly communicating our product or service’s value without exaggerating or misleading audiences?
  • Are we using plain English that honestly communicates the features and benefits of our products and services?
  • Is our copy accessible and concise?
  • Are we accurately quoting our customers, partners, and team when we share reviews or testimonials?
  • Is our use of data and examples honest and accurate when promoting our features, benefits, or the impact of our products and services?  Are we choosing to exclude anything we shouldn’t?
  • Is there internal pressure to communicate dishonest information within your marketing and communications? If so, push back or disengage from the project.

We Commit to Rejecting Impact Washing, Greenwashing and Sportswashing

Impact washing, greenwashing and sports washing happens when a business exaggerates their positive impact to gain a marketing advantage or uses “feel good” marketing to cover up or distract from negative outcomes that their core business model is having in other areas – usually socially or environmentally.

We commit to being fully honest and transparent about the social and environmental impacts of our work, and to always be able to demonstrate that impact.

We pledge to avoid:

  • Exaggerating impact by inflating numbers, cherry-picking data, or focusing on stories that aren’t representative of overall outcomes;
  • Sharing stories about, or promoting partnerships that create social or environmental impact without being able to demonstrate that impact.
  • Communicating false promises or making unrealistic claims about expected results;
  • Sharing stories or creating impact initiatives that aren’t rooted in an authentic mission or intention for good, and aligned with the values of a business – values are the core of our marketing plans –but purely for the marketing benefits;
  • Using a social impact initiative to distract from negative social or environmental problems caused by their core processes, products, or services

We Commit to Cultural Sensitivity in Campaign Creative

Many marketing campaigns and messages have the potential to be insensitive. We aim to be self-aware and inclusive of others in the creative process to avoid marketing campaigns that are insensitive.

Our Marketing Projects Will Avoid the Savior Complex.

Sometimes well-intentioned people target a perceived need for support without including and empowering the affected community. They may use their access to resources to provide a solution solely from their external position of privilege. This approach can be characterised as a saviour complex and resulting communications, solutions, and power dynamics are often problematic and reinforce systems of oppression.

We will always involve and represent people with lived experience of the issues the services or products we promote may include.

We pledge to:

  • Take steps to avoid any exploitation, appropriation, or stereotyping of underrepresented or oppressed people or groups within marketing content.
  • Seek out feedback on the appropriateness and sensitivity of marketing content. This looks different for different projects, but often involves obtaining as much stakeholder input as possible, and engaging the target audience via surveys, interviews and user-testing
  • Arrange and promote ongoing internal training to increase awareness of cultural sensitivity and inclusiveness.  We are partnering with Watch this space to this end. 

We Commit to Permission-Based Email Marketing

“Permission based marketing is anticipated, personal, and relevant.” – Seth Godin

The term permission marketing was originated by marketing thought leader Seth Godin in his 1999 book by the same name to describe marketing where the recipient of the marketing messages provides permission to send them marketing materials. Another way to describe this is that they have opted in to receiving marketing messages.

We pledge to focus our email marketing on:

  • Creating value within any free content (including videos, blogs, online resources, online classes, social media posts, etc.),
  • Considering real people and their interests, and sharing content we feel connects us and is of genuine interes.
  • Being GDPR compliant
  • Maintaining the trust of email lists by continuing to offer value and restricting messaging to content related to what the original opt-in intent.

We Commit to Ethical Digital Advertising

All advertising content lands somewhere on the honesty spectrum – from manipulative and dishonest to accurate, ethical and honest. 

Huxley is committed to ensuring the accuracy and ethics of the content we promote through digital advertising.

Aside from considering the accuracy and honesty of the content, we must also consider the ethics of the targeting approach. 

Digital advertising brings its own unique set of ethical issues related to data privacy. Facebook, Google, and many other digital media companies have developed sophisticated tracking technologies in order to understand, profile, track, and target users online so that their paying advertisers can reach their exact target audience via their digital advertising products and services. 

This kind of granular targeting often comes at the cost of individual users’ privacy. As consumer attitudes and technologies change, the ethical considerations that surround digital advertising are rapidly evolving. It is highly likely that the line of what is both legal and ethically acceptable will shift many times over the short and long term.

Our Approach to Ethical Advertising Includes the following considerations:

  • False advertising: If an advertisement makes untrue claims about a product or services or clearly misrepresents what is being offered then it is false advertising which is clearly an unethical marketing tactic.
  • Issues with Advertorial Advertising: It is important that an online user can tell what is paid advertising vs what is editorial content. Advertorial content is content that looks like unbiased editorial/earned media but is actually paid advertising. This type of content can take place on written articles, social media posts, written reviews, or videos. Influencer marketing often relies on the process of well connected social influencers promoting products or services to their audiences, often through content that would be considered advertorial if the influencer is not transparent that the content is a paid promotion. While advertorial content may be seen by some as an ethical grey area, it is increasingly becoming clear that misleading users into believing that a brand mention is based on editorial merit alone, when in fact the placement was paid for by the brand is an unethical marketing tactic by both the publisher and brand buying the paid content.
  • Pop ups, pop unders and modal windows – There are a wide variety of types of pop-up style promotions that websites can deploy. Pop ups or pop unders (that create new tabs or windows behind the main browser window, are now widely considered unethical marketing tactics. Few users actually engage with this type of content.
  • Considering accessibility in all copy and design used for advertising.  We will consider all users and their potential needs, ensuring copy communicates effectively, design is clear and accessible to users with visual impairments, and alternative text / captioning is used.

We Commit to White Hat Search Engine Optimisation

Search engines use algorithms to determine what content to show at the top. 

Anywhere where robots are making decisions that will affect business outcomes opens up the opportunity for hacking and manipulation. In the world of SEO and content marketing, any tactics that are considered manipulative or unethical are typically referred to as “black hat” tactics. 

On the opposite end of this spectrum, you’ll find ethical or “white hat” SEO tactics based on providing valuable and useful content that aligns with what users and search algorithms are looking for.

We Practise and Encourage the Following Best Practices for White Hat SEO and Content Marketing:

  • Creating valuable content that people will want to link to
  • Proper use of redirects to help users find the right content
  • Creating helpful and accessible 404 pages with useful navigation
  • Put the user first, focus on enjoyable experience and value for the user, create content that aligns with purpose
  • Consider accessibility by ensuring websites are performant and lightweight.

Black Hat SEO: Tactics that We Avoid and Discourage

  • Purchasing links – Paying for links from other websites. Links should be built organically out of merit and from real relationships and partnerships.
  • Automated link building – Using software or online bots to build links.
  • Hidden content and links – Intentionally hiding content or links so that only the search engines can see them.
  • Automated, stolen or plagiarised content generation – Using content scraping  technology, AI content development, or direct content theft to generate high volumes of content to build your site’s size and perceived authority.
  • Keywords stuffing, over optimization – There is a fine line between manually optimising content for SEO best practices (white hat on-page optimization) and over optimization which can also be called keyword stuffing. It takes experience and a deep understanding of the latest algorithms to learn where this line is. As the algorithm changes, the line may shift over time.
  • Misdirection – Unethical redirects: Cloaking and doorway pages. There are a variety of shady redirection schemes used in black hat SEO. These typically involve redirecting people away from long form content into pages that are more focused on conversions/sales, affiliate marketing, or paid advertising. In these cases the content that appealed to the search engine algorithm which resulted in the high organic ranking is not what the user sees after they click the link.

We Commit to Update these Practices as the Industry Evolves

We expect ethical marketing practices to continue to evolve along with the technologies marketers use to discover, reach, and engage audiences. 

The line that separates ethical from unethical marketing practices can shift rapidly as major online platforms such as Google, Facebook, and other search and social applications roll out updates and new options for data-driven targeting. 

We will continue to monitor the state of the field across different marketing channels and tactics and update our practices accordingly.

 

Advice or feedback?

We always strive to do the right thing for our clients and adhering to these ethical practices is part of that work. If you have questions or feedback to share that will help us do better, we encourage you to reach out and let us know. Please contact us using our website contact form for any of the following:

  • To request more information
  • To provide feedback
  • To access, edit, or delete personal information we may have about you
  • To register a complaint

This policy was last updated on 5th April 2022