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Building Trust at Every Touchpoint The Institute for Advertising Ethics is gaining momentum, propelled by the success of our October Global Ethics Day in New York. Across participants and panelists alike, IAE’s Ethics Day affirmed a growing consensus that trust is now becoming operational, measurable, teachable, and scalable throughout the advertising and media ecosystem. Global Ethics Day 2025: Building Trust at Every Touchpoint The Liberty Room at Frankfurt Kurnit was filled on October 15 as leaders from industry, government, civil society and academia united for IAE Ethics Day 2025. Delegates from the U.S. Government, ANA Ethics Center, Microsoft, Kenvue, Uber, LinkedIn, Google LLC, Yahoo Inc., Accenture, Dentsu, Paul Weiss, Mastercard, and many others came together around a single, urgent theme: advancing the creation of scalable ethics standards to restore trust across the $1.5 trillion advertising and media industry, especially amid the rise of AI. The work is well underway, led by leaders shaping an open, validated, multi-stakeholder standard, one that delivers transparency, interoperability, verifiability, and broad adoption. Highlights included: “The future of advertising depends not only on innovation but on trust. Ethics shouldn't be understood as a constraint on innovation, rather as a catalyst for it." -Dr. Juan Mundel, Editor, Journal of Advertising Education. Dr. Juan Mundel speaks about rebuilding trust in Advertisin g “We need to create a culture where people can ask questions and where we prioritize ethics.” -Dr. Anna McAlister, Director of Curriculum and Assessment, IAE Experts highlight the role of ethics education and self-regulation in the Advertising Industry “Trust is the new currency in our industry. Without it, even the most creative campaigns can’t sustain real impact.” -Ty Heath, Director and co-founder of the B2B Institute, LinkedIn Fireside Trust Performance and Ethics in Action “People tend to believe computers are smarter than we are, which makes us less likely to question their output.” -Dr. Dana LaFon, U.S. Government Panel Explores Global Ethical Frameworks Guiding AI and Advertising “AI knows, but AI doesn’t think and AI doesn’t feel. That’s a line that’s helpful for me.” -Esther Uhalte Cisneros, Head of eCommerce & Retail Sales, Germany, Google Experts Debate “Where to Draw the Line” in Advertising Ethics, AI and Authenticity “Legal is [...] the floor and ethics is the ceiling. Even if something is legally correct, it may not be ethically right to do.” -Peri Fluger, General Counsel, Ruder Finn Building a Culture of Compliance: From Policy to Practice

At the Global Ethics Day session hosted by the Institute for Advertising Ethics, legal and communications leaders from Uber, LinkedIn and Ruder Finn joined attorney Jeffrey Greenbaum of Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz to discuss how companies can translate ethical principles into practice. Greenbaum opened by noting that ethical advertising often goes beyond legal compliance. “Even if you communicate truthful information to consumers, but you communicate it in a way that’s misleading, that in and of itself can be false advertising,” he said. Jess Smith, associate general counsel at Uber, said ethics should be embedded in company culture, not just policy. “It’s not just who the brand is — it’s what actions they take out in the world,” she said.

At the Global Ethics Day session hosted by the Institute for Advertising Ethics, panelists explored how ethical frameworks—Western and non-Western alike—shape the future of artificial intelligence and advertising. John C. Havens, a leading AI ethics expert and author, opened the discussion by contrasting Western “dualism” with indigenous and collective ethical traditions. “In the West, binary code—1 and 0—is based on dualism,” he said. “But traditions like Ubuntu ethics remind us, ‘I am because we are.’ When you take the best of Western thinking and apply what it means to be in community, you get the best of both worlds.” Alayna Kennedy, a data scientist and AI governance leader at MasterCard, emphasized the importance of turning abstract ethics into practical systems. “The real challenge is how to make fairness real—how to take a word on a page and turn it into a change in your product that impacts a real person,” she said. She added that MasterCard takes a “risk-based” approach to AI governance, focusing on identifying and mitigating potential harms while enabling innovation.

At the Global Ethics Day conference, industry leaders and academics explored how artificial intelligence, advertising ethics and authenticity intersect — and where companies should draw the line between innovation and manipulation. Esther Uhalte Cisneros of Google moderated the discussion, joined by Jackie Hernández, CEO of New Majority Ready, and Juan Mundel, associate professor at Michigan State University. Mundel shared new research showing that brands pulling back from diversity, equity and inclusion efforts risk losing consumer trust. “We found that consumers actually feel a breach of ethicality, and that breach hurts purchase intentions — we’re seeing a 20% decline,” he said. “It’s a reminder that academia and industry need to talk more about the data behind these decisions.” Hernández emphasized that ethics in advertising must evolve alongside technology. “Where you’re materially misleading a consumer is where I would see the thinking and the feeling that need to guide brand decisions,” she said.

At the Global Ethics Day session hosted by the Institute for Advertising Ethics, Ty Heath, director and co-founder of the B2B Institute at LinkedIn, and Senny Boone, senior vice president at the Association of National Advertisers, explored how ethics serve as a foundation for trust and long-term business success in both consumer and B2B marketing. The discussion, was moderated by ID Comms CEO Tom Denford, underscored that ethical practices aren’t just moral ideals—they’re strategic investments in trust that define the future of marketing. Heath compared ethics to architectural integrity, calling them “the foundational investment in the integrity of yourself and the institution you’re building.” She emphasized that companies with strong ethical principles build faster, smoother, and more sustainable relationships with clients. “The brand that’s remembered is the brand that’s bought,” she said, underscoring that reputation and trust directly influence business decisions.

At the Institute for Advertising Ethics’ (IAE) Global Ethics Day, Michigan State University professors Dr. Anna McAlister and Dr. Jef Richards shared award-winning research demonstrating the positive impact of the IAE’s Certified Ethical Advertising Executive (CEAE) training on students’ ethical attitudes. Dr. Richards explained that while advertising students nationwide often receive little to no formal ethics instruction, the CEAE program helps fill that gap. “Chances are there’s very little training in terms of ethics for the people entering the workplace in advertising,” he said. Richards and his coauthors conducted a before-and-after study comparing students who completed the CEAE certification with those who had not, examining whether the training measurably changed ethical perspectives. Dr. McAlister presented the study’s results, published in the Journal of Advertising Education and named the journal’s Best Paper of 2024. “Out of the 12 survey items, we found significant differences on nine,” she said. “The changes were in the direction we would expect — after taking this ethical training, attitudes were more positive toward ethics.”

At the Global Ethics Day session, Dr. Juan Mundel , associate professor at Michigan State University and editor of the Journal of Advertising Education, explored the evolving need for ethics in advertising and presented new research on the consumer impact of brands retreating from diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Mundel explained that advertising ethics “evolved as advertising practice and institutions matured in society,” noting that early ethical concerns emerged “with the introduction of psychological research into the practice of advertising.” Once advertisers realized they could “take advantage of people’s anxieties, insecurities and fears,” he said, “ethical overreach began.” He cited the Listerine case as a landmark example of accountability and drew parallels to the digital age, warning that “we all became subjects of an ongoing media experiment” with the rise of social media and algorithmic advertising. Ethical challenges, he said, have deepened with artificial intelligence, which raises issues of “opacity,” “proxy bias” and “feedback loops” that “elevate sensationalism, fear or insecurity.” In sharing his research, Mundel said brands that withdraw from promised commitments efforts face consumer backlash. “We’re seeing a 20% decline in purchase intent from consumers who feel that their ethics have been actually hurt,” he said, describing such pullbacks as a “breach of ethicality.” Mundel emphasized the importance of collaboration between academia and industry to promote ethical standards. “This is another great opportunity to encourage us to have more dialogue between academia and the industry,” he said. He concluded that the future of advertising “will depend not only on innovation but on trust,” adding, “Ethics should not be understood as a constraint on innovation but rather as a catalyst for it.”

Meet Charlotte! A member of our Ethics Certified community.

Meet Max! A member of our Ethics Certified community and IAE Advisory Council.

Meet Camila! A member of our Ethics Certified community.

Dear members & partners, From CEAE earning the highest academic honor and national media recognition, to institutions embedding ethical skills at the core of learning and leadership, the message is clear: trust is the ultimate differentiator.

Meet Ken! A member of our Ethics Certified community and IAE Advisory Council.

Meet Philip! A member of our Ethics Certified community and IAE Advisory Council.

Dear members & partners, Big things are happening at IAE, and we want you in the loop! This month’s updates reflect bold action: new leadership, IAE in the news, faster certification, and what's coming next to bring ethics to the world of influencer marketing.