Ethics Certified Spotlight: Max Kalehoff

Institute for Advertising Ethics • September 17, 2025

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

Max is the Chief Growth Officer at Realeyes, where he leads their business product line that delivers creative intelligence for better business outcomes. Realeyes works with large consumer advertisers like P&G, Mars, and Coca-Cola, platforms like Google and Meta, agencies like WPP, Publicis, and Group Black, and measurement partners like Nielsen.


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

My academic training in marketing, communications, and psychology-statistical research methods offered me a strong foundation in law and ethics. For me, the IAE certification was a practical and accessible refresher. It contextualizes the most important ethical principles to inform everyday challenges in the fast-changing world of modern advertising. Whether you have formal training in advertising ethics or not, the certification is highly useful. It's even useful for consumers, who don't work in advertising, as it sheds a light on the good and the bad of the advertising industry—making you a more informed consumer.


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

I work deeply in advertising data and analytics, and a burgeoning area called "creative intelligence." We are a B2B and a B2B2C company, so we must address ethics with both consumers and businesses, alike. For example, we engage directly with human participants in consumer research and data collection. We also engage in business relationships with large advertisers, agencies and publisher platforms—who also engage directly with consumers. We manage a lot of sensitive consumer and business data.


Furthermore, we are a pioneer in AI technologies and applications, so that topic alone introduces entirely new ethical challenges in our business and across all our stakeholders. Our advertising world is changing fast, so a strong foundation in ethics is key, as well as a foundation that can expand and adapt.


Why is ethics important for advertising?

Ethics enables trust and sustainability, period. Without trust and sustainability, there would be no advertising industry. That would not be good, as advertising is a key component of democracy and our global economy.



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

Trust and confidence in institutions is waning, including in government, business, and the advertising industry, itself. That often is due to breaches in ethical behavior. In advertising, some of the big ethical challenges lie in:

- Child protection and mental health in the age of mobile and social media

- Monopolistic, destructive tendencies of large technology platforms that exist on advertising

- Unregulated AI

- Polarization and misinformation, which blurs and distorts facts and expectations of ethics


Can you share a time when you encountered an ethical dilemma? What were the outcomes?

How about an issue I encounter all the time? I work in the advertising industry, which ranks among the industries lowest in consumer trust. Why? Because of a tendency to operate in gray areas of ethics. Often enough, my industry fully breaches reasonable ethical standards. On the flip side, advertising contributes positively to the world in many big ways. 


I fundamentally believe I can contribute to advertising's viability as an active, ethical leader. However, I always question that assertion because being an active leader means you can't be an aggressive ethics watchdog—the gray would consumer all you time, and make you a lot of enemies, and result in ostracization. So I occasionally ask myself: could I make a bigger impact on our world if I pursued a non-advertising career so I could more clearly and openly recognize and address advertising's shortcomings? 


Deep thoughts. :-)

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Bulletin #9: Momentum Grows: Leaders Unite to Build Trust in Advertising

By Logan Chrisinske • November 20, 2025
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

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.