Doug Thomas: Ethics in PPC Advertising

Transcript: Ethics in PPC Advertising

Hey y’all! Thanks so much, Jyll for having me here at PPC Zone and Sarah for the presentation!

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I’m Doug Thomas. My pronouns are he and him. I’ve been in the digital marketing world for 12 years,

doing almost everything under the digital sun, including search, social, and video advertising.

Now, I’m the lead strategist at Magniventris, an ethical digital marketing company that helps

organizations make their digital marketing more inclusive, accessible, safe, ethical and effective.

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Today, I’m super-excited to show y’all some ways to make your PPC Advertising more ethical. We’re

gonna go over one thing from each of the three different ways that ethics comes up in PPC advertising:

inclusion, accessibility, and privacy.

And while we do that, I want y’all to think about – and if you’re comfortable, share in chat — what

ethical issues keep you up at night.

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Inclusivity is maybe the first step to making our ads ethical. It’s ultimately an important goal: we want to

make sure all of our clients’ customers feel like they’re welcome to buy the thing we’re advertising.

This isn’t just a moral imperative – it’s part of over three decades of law for industries like the financial

world.

In 1989, the regulations for Fair Housing Advertising were published, providing FHA lenders with

guidance on how to create advertising that doesn’t exclude people. Among advice around media

placements, translation, and copy, the regulations have a section about what they call “Selective Use of

Human Models.”

This section instructs that when you’re using stock photos, you have to actually represent the people

that are in your audience. This seems simple, but there are thousands of times when you’ve seen this

just not happen.

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As an example, let’s look at one of the most successful DTC companies – Shein. If you look for a dress,

you see literally just one model, a thin white woman. Their regular sizing goes from size 4 to size 12.

Customers might wonder: how do these clothes fit on different bodies?

If Shein provided even just one other model, showing how the dress fits on a different body type, their

sales would increase, their returns would decrease, and overall the retailer’s profitability would be even

higher.

This is just one example of how someone might use inclusivity to make their ads more effective, but I

think it’s the most obvious. For every business, showing your audience how your product helps the real

them will always be more effective than showing someone who’s only kind of like them.

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But it’s not enough to just look like you help people like them. July is Disability Pride Month, bringing

awareness and visibility to the disability community. The next step to making your PPC advertising more

ethical is supporting folks who might use the web differently than the majority of users.

One definition of “disability” is key to how we can approach accessibility. Microsoft’s Inclusive Toolkit

defines disability not as a personal health condition, but a mismatch between expected and actual

human interactions.

Using this definition, we can think of accessibility as not an attempt to design for some unknowable

edge case, but as improving the usability of the site for everyone.

And usability is no more important than on the most important part of a lead-generating landing page:

the form.

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So let’s look at a form I recently redesigned, from a Wix site. This form has some great points for

accessibility, notably the size of the inputs and the clearly-delineated input areas. But there’s two big

issues we can solve.

The first issue is the basic layout: two columns, then one. This creates a moment of hesitation for the

user, because the zig-zag eye motion adds to the cognitive load required to complete the form.

The next issue is easily seen in the first two fields. There are no labels! They only use placeholders. This

creates a few problems.

On longer forms, this can make people lose their place. In addition, labels act as click targets, increasing

the area where people can click to activate the field. And for people who use screen readers, using just

placeholders can affect how the screen reader reads the form.

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So here’s the redesigned form. One column, with labels.

By focusing on the usability of your landing pages, you’ll increase the accessibility for all your customers.

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Now, representing your customers and doing the work to support their needs is great. But there’s one

final thing to do to help your PPC campaigns be more ethical. Actually informing our clients’ customers’

of how we use their data is a vastly under-represented way to be ethical about our PPC advertising.

So many times, when we drive ads to a website, we see a privacy policy that quickly devolves into 10-

cent words like “herein” and vague phrases like “trusted third parties.”

What’s funny is that there’s a legal requirement against this – GDPR’s Article 12 requires that data

controllers provide information about data processing “in a concise, transparent, intelligible and easily

accessible form, using clear and plain language”

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The good news is that one of the best privacy policy templates comes built in to the most widely-used

CMS on the web – WordPress.

The first thing you’ll notice is that the WordPress privacy policy asks you to state exactly what personal

data you collect. If you’ve been keeping up with the news, you’ll know that IP Addresses, locations, and

even device types are all considered personal data. Tell your customers everything that you collect.

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The second great thing is that it separates out your data collection by action, so you can structure your

privacy policy like your data audit. This helps you organize your privacy policy in a way that helps

customers see where their data’s going based on what they do on the site.

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Finally, the WordPress template provides sections for other data partners. Your hosting company logs

personal information, your web analytics collects personal information, and if you’re using an email

service to collect newsletter signups, you’re sending then personal information. Your customers deserve

to know specifically who else gets their data.

Privacy policies communicate how advertising actually works to the public. We as advertisers have to

help our clients and their customers protect their data online.

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So that’s a quick overview of ethical considerations in PPC.

Promote inclusivity by using models that reflect all of your audience.

Focus on usability for all of your users to help increase accessibility.

And use a descriptive plain-language privacy policy to explain to your clients’ customers how you use

their personal information.

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I hope y’all have gotten out of the time we’ve have together the same feeling that I have about doing

marketing ethically: that every thing that makes our marketing more ethical also makes it more

effective.

Thanks for having me, and stay tuned for Armina.