A Call To CMOs To Be Responsible

While purpose is becoming a pillar of doing business, companies and their marketers for the most part are becoming more responsible in how they go to market. Of course technology continues to play an integral role in the transformation and practice of marketing. And digital platforms (like Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter and increasingly, Amazon) have helped drive breakthroughs in efficiency, customer intimacy, and personalization. But Lisa Macpherson—a Senior Fellow in the Harvard University Advanced Leadership Initiative—has come to believe that partnering with technology platforms to achieve such powerful marketing benefits makes marketing leaders complicit in the negative impacts of digital platforms, too.

Macpherson is best known in the marketing community for leading purpose-driven brands, including a few that embody the purpose of bringing people together. She was the CMO of Hallmark (greeting cards) and Custom Ink (custom t-shirts for groups), and worked as an independent marketing consultant to Pernod Ricard (spirits). But she’s no anti-tech zealot: she led digital marketing transformation for all three companies and has focused her research at Harvard on innovation in the technology sector.

I caught up with Macpherson at a recent meeting of The Conference Board’s Council of CMOs where she was testing a call to action to marketing leaders: to recognize the enormous leverage they hold to help ensure that future technology development is aligned with the public interest.

As data and technology became the driver of more and more of Macpherson’s work as a CMO, she began to feel she was losing touch with the empathy, humanity and creativity that had attracted her to marketing in the first place. But she also became concerned about how digital platforms’ capabilities—created for and almost entirely funded by advertising—were affecting our well being, our society, and our democracy. In short, she became concerned about how technology was pulling people apart.

Enter Harvard University’s Advanced Leadership Initiative, a year-long, cross-disciplinary program designed to prepare experienced leaders to tackle complex social challenges. Macpherson’s studies and research there affirmed the idea that digital platforms have created enormous social benefit as well as extraordinary economic value - primarily through highly targeted and cost-efficient advertising.

But her research also gave her greater perspective on the connection between the advertising business model and the societal impacts of digital technology:

1. Monopolistic practices: the Department of Justice, Federal Trade Commission, and groups including all 50 states’ attorneys general are investigating whether some of the platforms use their scale and market power—as well as the “walled garden” structure marketers know so well—to drive unfair pricing or impede innovation.

2. Digital dependence: academics and medical professionals are trying to understand how the imperative to capture and hold users’ attention on behalf of advertisers leads to user experience design that creates a whole range of negative psychological effects—including the effects associated with addiction.

3. Information distortion: this refers to the way precision targeting of content—including ads—creates echo chambers of people’s existing beliefs. It also refers to the distribution of misinformation and hate speech. All of these can increase polarization, undermine quality journalism and negatively impact the democratic process.

4. Privacy and data abuses: this refers to the voracious data demands of the platforms’ advertising business model, and how the recombination and exploitation of personal data, often without the user’s informed consent, can result in a loss of privacy, autonomy and equity.

These impacts, combined with a string of data breaches and fines, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and claims of foreign election interference, have begun to decrease trust in the digital platforms and increase the desire for more control of content, consumer data and privacy.

That is the basis of Macpherson’s appeal to CMOs: “Marketing approaches should be designed for a future in which, based on a forecast among academics, researchers and regulators, there will be increased regulation and decreased trust in brands that are associated with these impacts,” she said.

According to Macpherson, she asked the members in the Council meeting to:

• Pay more attention to content integrity: the use of algorithmically-optimized and programmatically–distributed ads often puts marketers at arm’s length from their own advertising, including where it’s appearing. “I offered a range of strategies designed to ensure ads are appearing in a safe context and supporting sites with information integrity,” she said.

• Take a more responsible approach to consumer data: similarly, the explosion of martech and third-party data aggregators and brokers can leave marketers at a distance from their own customers. “And I listed ways marketers can move from a compliance mindset to one of digital trust,” she continued.

Macpherson acknowledges that “Realizing the enormous benefits of digital platforms for more personalized marketing experiences, while mitigating their negative impacts, is a complex balancing act.” And she says that it will probably require a set of solutions involving:

• Education to change people’s behaviors in regard to their technology;

• Creation of new incentives for the technology platforms; and

• Inevitably, policy and regulation, including at the federal level.

However, some of these are always slow, and some can be fast. But as Macpherson says, “Given that 95% or more of most digital platforms’ revenue comes from advertising, there is no community with more leverage to change the negative impacts of digital technology on our well-being, our society, and our democracy than the marketing community.”

Macpherson has just accepted a full-time position at a non-profit in Washington where she hopes to advocate and shape public policy in regard to public interest technology. And she’d like to continue refining her call to action to progressive marketers.

In Macpherson’s view—and I admit, my own—the operative word in contemporary marketing is purpose. Marketers believe consumers will put their money where their values are, and examine all of a company’s environmental, social and governance (ESG) practices in assessing their brands. Aligning our marketing investments with personal well-being, civil society and a strong democracy as well as our own brand objectives seems like a good thing to add to the ESG list.