Ethics Certified Spotlight: Charlotte Woodcock

Institute for Advertising Ethics • September 18, 2025

Meet Charlotte! A member of our Ethics Certified community.

Charlotte serves as the Community Engagement and Marketing Associate for HAWK Advisers and SafePark USA, where she has been part of the team for nearly three years. As a one-person, in-house marketing department, she manages a broad range of responsibilities including social media strategy, email marketing, content development, copywriting, tradeshow and event management, and community outreach, among other tasks.


In addition to her role at HAWK, she represents Ad 2 National as the 2nd Vice Chair, supporting the 32-and-under division of the American Advertising Federation (AAF). Formerly, she served as president of her local club, Ad 2 Roanoke, and now contributes at the national level by mentoring other Ad 2 Presidents, advocating for member success, and collaborating with the executive committee to strengthen clubs across the country.



How have the IAE's certifications impacted you, your career, and your approach to ethical advertising?

The IAE certifications have been instrumental in strengthening my understanding of advertising ethics, ensuring I stay as current as possible in a continuously evolving landscape. Both the insurance and marketing industries shift rapidly, and navigating that overlap can be challenging—especially when striving to reach core audiences with efficiency and impact. The three courses I completed offer clear and practical guidance, and I found that they equip me with the knowledge to anticipate and address ethical challenges before they even arise.


What Ethical Advertising Principles and Practices do you actively apply in your work and how?

The core message of trust in Principle 9 resonated deeply with me and my role in the insurance industry. My agency, HAWK, is built on a model of personalized transparency, and this principle directly aligns with how we serve our clients and maintain their trust with privacy and continued disclosure from their agent. Being able to apply these same ideologies in our marketing is paramount.


This course reinforced the importance of communicating that message effectively: building trust while ensuring consumer data is treated with the highest level of respect!


Principle 9.

Trust between advertising and public relations business partners, including clients, and their agencies, media vendors, and third party suppliers, should be built upon transparency and full disclosure of business ownership and arrangements, agency remuneration and rebates, and media incentives.


Why is ethics important for advertising?

Without ethics, advertising loses all impact. Ethical considerations form the backbone of any successful campaign—when consumer well-being isn’t prioritized, the message falls flat, never to see the end of the marketing funnel. Trust is the foundation of engagement, and without it, even the strongest creative will falter.


What are some of the biggest ethical challenges you see in advertising today and how do you think these challenges can be overcome?

Without a doubt, AI is the greatest challenge. Its quickly evolving capabilities highlight a key dilemma: the need for clear guidelines around non-transparent content generation.


AI-generated imagery is definitely at the forefront of this issue, raising questions about its responsible use in media and advertising. How these standards are and will be shaped will undoubtedly determine the trustworthiness of AI as a tool. It will be fascinating to watch!

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Building a Culture of Compliance: From Policy to Practice

By Logan Chrisinske • November 3, 2025
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.

Panel Explores Global Ethical Frameworks Guiding AI and Advertising

By Logan Chrisinske • October 31, 2025
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.

Experts Debate “Where to Draw the Line” in Advertising Ethics, AI and Authenticity

By Logan Chrisinske • October 31, 2025
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.