Editorial
Research Report
The 2026 State of CX Outsourcing
The Gist
- AI agents are forcing a new ethical reckoning. With 71% of national brands saying ethical and privacy standards are needed for agent-led recommendations, marketers can no longer treat AI governance as optional.
- Capability now outpaces consensus. From predictive analytics and emotion targeting to AI-generated personas and dynamic pricing, brands can execute tactics faster than they can align internally on whether they should.
- Ethics must become an operational muscle. Structured internal debates — using real, scenario-based marketing tactics — help organizations define their ethical boundaries before regulators or public backlash define them instead.
The issue of ethics in digital marketing is being supercharged by advancements in data management, machine learning, generative AI and AI agents. In particular, that last one is ringing alarm bells for brands. According to an EMarketer survey, 71% of national brands say that marketers need to establish ethical and privacy standards for agent-led recommendations and purchases.
Looking more broadly, the core questions brands are asking themselves is:
Just because we can do something, does that mean we should? And if we should, how can we do it safely and ethically?
To spark internal conversations and help brands get alignment across their marketing teams, below are a bunch of statements about potential marketing tactics. Many involve AI, but not all. Rate the statements yourself, then have your teams rate them. Use those to identify the points of divergence. Foster conversations around those issues to get everyone on the same page and to refine your AI strategies.
It's worth emphasizing that the list includes tactics that may run afoul of the law. While mitigating legal risk should absolutely be a goal of any brand, finding your brand's ethical compass and building consensus around that is the primary intent of this exercise.
(Disclosure: I'm neither a lawyer nor an ethicist. Consult one if you need one.)
Related Article: Which AI Path Will You Take as a Marketer?
Table of Contents
Rate These Digital Marketing Tactics
Below is a list of statements about potential marketing tactics. For each one, indicate to what degree you agree or disagree with the statement using a 5-point Likert scale:
- Strongly Agree
- Agree
- Neither Agree Nor Disagree
- Disagree
- Strongly Disagree
When Using Predictive Analytics …
- It's ethical to analyze a customer's campaign engagement times to infer the best times to send future campaigns to them.
- It's ethical to analyze a customer's engagement with your campaigns across channels (e.g., email, SMS, push) to optimize campaign frequencies across those channels.
- It's ethical to analyze a customer's purchase and browsing behavior with your brand to infer which products they're most likely to buy next to power recommendations.
- It's ethical to analyze a customer's purchase and browsing behavior with your brand and other brands via data purchases to infer which products they're most likely to buy next to power recommendations.
- It's ethical to analyze a customer's purchase and browsing behavior with your brand and other brands via permission-based data sharing to infer which products they're most likely to buy next to power recommendations.
- It's ethical to analyze a customer's purchase and browsing behavior with your brand to infer if they are pregnant to power recommendations.
- It's ethical to analyze a customer's purchase and browsing behavior with your brand to infer if they are likely to buy baby-related products.
- It's ethical to analyze a customer's purchase and browsing behavior with your brand to infer if they have an affinity for Black culture.
- It's ethical to analyze a customer's purchase and browsing behavior with your brand to infer if they are Black.
- It's ethical to analyze a customer's engagement with your campaigns to determine if they respond to negative or positive emotions to power future messaging that features those emotions.
- It's ethical to analyze a customer's public social media feeds or other public web information to infer their hobbies to power recommendations.
- It's ethical to analyze a customer's public social media feeds or other public web information to infer if they're overweight to power targeted promotions for weight-loss products.
- It's ethical to analyze a customer's public social media feeds or other public web information to infer if they're overweight to power targeted promotions for high-fat, -salt, and -sugar foods.
Related Article: Is Email the Best Path to AI Commerce Dominance?
When Creating Content …
- It's ethical to refrain from disclosing when generative AI is used to create marketing copy.
- It's ethical to refrain from disclosing when generative AI is used to create marketing copy that appears to be authored by a particular person.
- It's ethical to refrain from disclosing when generative AI is used to create marketing copy that appears to be authored by a particular person and that person didn't review or approve the copy.
- It's ethical to analyze the diction, word choices, and other speech patterns a customer uses (e.g., on social media, in their correspondence with your brand) and then use generative AI to mimic those patterns back to them in one or more of your campaigns.
- It's ethical to send a marketing email that is image-heavy and includes little to no HTML text or alt text.
- It's ethical to refrain from disclosing when generative AI is used to create an image.
- It's ethical to refrain from disclosing when generative AI is used to create a background setting that isn't real.
- It's ethical to refrain from disclosing when generative AI is used to create a clothing model.
- It's ethical to refrain from disclosing when generative AI is used to create a clothing model avatar that is based on a real person who has given your brand permission to use their likeness.
- It's ethical to publish a video without closed captioning.
- It's ethical to have a video auto-play.
- It's ethical to refrain from disclosing when generative AI is used to create some or all of the content of a video.
- It's ethical to publish a podcast without providing a transcript.
- It's ethical to refrain from disclosing when generative AI is used to create the voiceover for a video.
- It's ethical to use virtual influencers (i.e., completely fabricated personas that have a substantial number of social media followers).
- It's ethical to use virtual influencers without disclosing that it's not a real person.
Related Article: 4 Ways AI Breaks Marketing Trust — and What Comes Next for 2026
When Using Personalization …
- It's ethical to use a customer's IP address to infer their general location to highlight local store offers and product availability.
- It's ethical to use a customer's IP address to infer their general location in order to comply with state and national privacy, marketing, and advertising regulations.
- It's ethical to use a customer's IP address to infer their travel patterns and activities (e.g., distances traveled from home, frequency of travel, recurring destinations) to power product recommendations.
- It's ethical to display non-personalized product recommendations among personalized products to ease customer concerns about your brand tracking their behavior.
- It's ethical to personalize product recommendations when that content doesn't include any HTML text or alt text.
- It's ethical to automatically personalize product images with a customer's name when they didn't share their name with your brand and you got it via a third-party source.
- It's ethical to automatically personalize product images with the name of a customer's child when they didn't share their child's name with your brand and you got it via a third-party source.
When Using Names …
- It's ethical to use an employee's name as the sender name for a campaign when the message wasn't written, reviewed, or approved by that person.
- It's ethical to continue to use an employee's first name as the sender name for a campaign even after they've left the company.
- It's ethical to use an organization-assigned nickname or alias in a campaign rather than the employee's real name, which might be culturally unfamiliar to many of your prospects and customers.
- It's ethical to use a fictitious person's name as the sender name for a campaign.
- It's ethical to use the organization-assigned name of an AI bot or AI agent as the sender name for a campaign.
Related Article: AI's Impact on Digital Marketing Jobs: The Highest ROI Opportunity
When Creating Urgency …
- It's ethical to indicate your brand only has a small number of a particular product in stock when you actually have more in stock.
- It's ethical to indicate your brand only has a small number of a particular product in stock when you will have more in stock imminently.
- It's ethical to indicate a sale is ending soon when you're planning to extend the sale.
- It's ethical to tell webinar registrants that only the first 400 registrants will receive the recording when you've never had more than 200 webinar registrants before.
When Thinking About Prices and Margins …
- It's ethical to deliver a large special discount offer to customers who haven't purchased in a long time to encourage them to buy again.
- It's ethical to deliver smaller or larger discounts to customers based on their industry.
- It's ethical to deliver smaller or larger discounts to customers based on how price- or discount-sensitive they are, as determined by past purchases.
- It's ethical to promote more full-price and higher priced products to customers who live in zip codes with higher home values.
- It's ethical to promote more full-price and higher priced products to customers who have iPhones than ones that have Android phones.
- It's ethical to promote more full-price and higher priced products to customers who have a proven propensity to buy full-price and higher priced products from your brand.
Related Article: Survive the AI Takeover of Search — 5 Moves Every Brand Must Make
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Come Up With Your Own Ethical Marketing Statements
While reading those statements, you probably thought of additional ones that are germane to your organization or industry. You may want to add those to the list because they're ethically murky, totally illegal, or completely above board.
Those are all valid reasons to include them in your team conversations, as they'll spark entirely different conversations and strengthen the culture and compliance of your organization.
As brands navigate these complex ethical questions, understanding the fundamentals of personalization, predictive analytics and agentic customer experience becomes essential for making informed decisions that balance innovation with responsibility.
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