Today, DLB presents the second of two parts in its practical critique of the WOMMA's "Honesty ROI," as a candidate ethical code for advertisers, and provides the hint for moving forward with design ethics.
I ended Wednesday saying that I find the WOMMA's "Honesty ROI" to be correct, consistent, and almost totally uninformative. Obviously, I implied, we'd like to have an ethical code that is deeply informative, one that can give us useful guidelines for handling a variety of situations in satisfactory ways. While the WOMMA are right (as we have long attested) that not telling lies is a correct ethical guideline for marketers to follow, we'd like to see a code that gives us a little bit more.
Of course, it's one thing to merely criticize, and quite another to make some positive steps toward a code like that. The latter is our objective today.
Which means that you're going to have to pardon me, because I'm about to get a little philosophical.
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Paul — Jan 23, 2009
Today, DLB presents the first of two parts in its practical critique of the WOMMA's "Honesty ROI," as a candidate ethical code for advertisers.
You will recall that on Monday, I presented the three aspects of the so-called Honesty ROI by the WOMMA. You may also recall that I expressed some reservations about the distinctness of the so-called R-rule and the I-rule. That's where I'll start today. I want to collapse the R-rule into the I-rule. I've thought about this, and I think that if a marketer fails to disclose her relationship to a company whose product she's promoting, she's ostensibly doing nothing more than violating the I-rule, because she fails to identify herself as a marketer, and thus tacitly represents herself as an average consumer. So there are really two rules now:
- The RI-rule: Marketers should not masquerade as non-marketers.
- The O-rule: Marketers should not enforce their own (or their employers') opinions on consumers.
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Paul — Jan 21, 2009
This week, Design Less Better will be thinking about the ethics of word of mouth marketing, and taking a look at the WOMMA Ethics Code to do so.
I talked a couple of weeks ago about how so-called social media can help your company's branding effort, and what that means about conducting your business. It is pretty obvious that social media is a (relatively) new kind of marketing game, which would seem to imply a new set of rules as well. Given that, I'd like to spend this week to being feeling out the ethical terrain of designing and strategizing with social media.
The pretty clear place to start this (at least according to Google) is looking at the published ethics code for the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA). Word of mouth marketing is the heart of most social media campaigns, and WOMMA has been advocating it since 2005. According to their mission, they employ an ethical code as part of their core strategy.
The Word of Mouth Marketing Association
The heart of the WOMMA code is the so-called "Honesty ROI," a name which should strike at least a tangential chord with us DLB types, given our insistence on the critical role of keeping meaningful promises in all types of corporate design and marketing. The R.O.I. in question here cashes out to: Relationship, Opinion, Identity. This week, my plan is to look at each of these points in turn, and evaluate the stance of the WOMMA against the stance that we've been developing. I'll look for both similarities and disjunctions, either of which will hopefully be instructive in our ongoing investigation of design ethics.
Today, I'll just paraphrase the WOMMA's position, and on Wednesday and Friday, I'll take it up in earnest.
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Paul — Jan 19, 2009
