Category: Single Minded2c3169a786

Apps that Imagine People Undressed

5/1/2025

by David Hagenbuch - professor of marketing at Messiah University -
author of Honorable Influence - founder of Mindful Marketing -
author of Mindful Marketing: Business Ethics that Stick

Disgusting, deplorable, despicable? For more than a decade, I’ve written about ethical issues in marketing, at times exposing certain organizations’ shameful strategies that have disgraced the discipline and hurt people. However, in this instance I’m at a loss for an adjective that can aptly describe the collective disdain there should be for AI that digitally undresses people: nudify apps.

Among the worst practices in marketing I’ve discussed over the years, two that immediately come to mind are Ernst & Young (EY) encouraging its employees to cheat on ethics exams (Cultures of Corruption, July 16, 2022) and Volkswagen integrating a “defeat device” in certain cars in order to trick vehicle emissions readers (Dirty Diesel was No Accident, September 26, 2015). While EY’s behavior was deplorable because of its utter irony, VW’s actions involved painstakingly planned manipulation, the likes of which is seldom seen.

However, neither of these approaches is any more appalling than the newest encroachment on moral sensibility: nudify apps.

What are nudify apps? Kerry Gallagher, the education director for ConnectSafely, as well as a school administrator, a teacher, and a mom of two, succinctly describes them as apps that “take a regular clothed photo of a person and use artificial intelligence to create a fake nude image.”

Although using a nudify app to create such images should alone seem improper, what makes matters worse is that the apps’ users routinely share the fake photos with others, often teens as young as middle school, who then use the deepfake photos to harass and humiliate classmates.

The most infamous case of such shaming occurred in June 2024 in Australia where deep-faked nude images of about 50 girls in two private schools were widely distributed. The perpetrator was a male student, formerly of one of the schools.

As one can imagine, the victims of nudify apps, who are often the last to know what’s been done, are devasted. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) is “deeply concerned about the potential for generative artificial intelligence to be used in ways that sexually exploit and harm children.” More specifically, NCMEC issues a stern warning about the damage nudify apps do:

“These manipulative creations can cause tremendous harm to children, including harassment, future exploitation, fear, shame, and emotional distress. Even when exploitative images are entirely fabricated, the harm to children and their families is very real.”

It might seem that creating a fake nude image of someone would clearly be illegal, but as often happens with new technology, laws lag behind individuals’ and organizations’ actions. In the United States, a provision in the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2022 made the sharing of intimate images without consent grounds for civil action in federal court, but if the images shared are fakes, i.e., not real explicit images, has the civil law truly been broken?

Regardless of that potential legal loophole, using nudify apps legally doesn’t mean doing so is ethical.

The significant psychological and social harms the images cause their victims are certainly moral concerns. However, such negative outcomes aren’t the only ethical grounds on which nudify apps should be judged. The behavior also violates at least two time-tested values:

Fairness: Every person has rights to privacy, including for their body. Even though they are not actual photographs, the images that nudify apps create look “hyper-realistic” because the algorithms that create them have been trained on “large datasets of explicit images,” which produces for viewers the effect that they are actually seeing the victim naked. It’s unfair to have the right to physical modesty ‘stripped away’ without consent.
Decency: The human body is a beautiful thing, not inherently indecent. However, over millennia, most cultures have adopted rational norms that limit physical exposure in public by prescribing what people should wear, from loincloths to leggings. Many societies have codified their norms into laws aimed at guiding behavior, like statutes against public indecency and the Motion Picture Association’s film rating system (PG-13, R, etc.). The point is, abundant precedent suggests that the primary end of nudify apps, to indiscriminately publicize human nakedness, including among minors, is fundamentally indecent.

So far the focus of this article has been on the users of nudify apps, who are certainly culpable for their shameful acts. At the same time, when the perpetrators are themselves children, it’s especially important to ask: Who else should bear responsibility? Those accountable should include:

Parents: Although it’s impossible to monitor everything one’s kids do on their laptops and phones, parents must establish at least some safety limits. Moreover, parents should model and discuss appropriate behaviors more broadly so their children assimilate values that will positively guide their daily choices.
Institutions: Schools should be proactive in addressing nudify apps with their students, letting them know that the apps are off-limits and warning students of the consequences for violations.
Government: Legislatures at all levels should consider how then can limit if not eliminate nudify apps. Some states like New Jersey are making the use of nudify apps a criminal offense.
Associations: For the benefit of their fields, professional groups can take stands against nudify apps specifically, and more generally they should clearly the communicate the values of fairness and decency that are fundamental to rejecting the apps, as well as future technology based on similar impropriety.

There’s one other set of responsible parties not mentioned above because they deserve accountability above any other – the apps’ creators.

It’s hard to imagine how the dozens of marketers of nudify apps justify their products. Maybe some rationalize, “They’re for people to nudify themselves,” but who needs to do that? In most imaginable instances, the apps’ purpose is to undress others without their knowledge or consent, then to share the sordid deepfakes with others.

As often happens in cases where business strategy goes awry, money has likely overshadowed any plausible mission for the creators of nudify apps and woefully skewed the tech entrepreneurs’ ambitions. Likewise, the apps’ creators seemingly failed to self-censure, or follow the moral mandate, Just because we can doesn’t mean we should.

One entity that can’t reasonably be held responsible is AI. Artificial intelligence is basically a value-neutral tool, often used for good purposes but sometimes for nefarious ones, as nudify apps illustrate. AI largely does what it’s told to do without questioning the ethicality of the instructions, which is the obligation of people.

As I’ve found through my own experiences using AI and as the following articles expound, it’s up to humans to hit pause when potential ethical issues arise and to ask the moral question, “Is this something we should be doing?”

Abominable, egregious, heinous, indefensible, reprehensible – maybe all these adjectives are needed to adequately describe the destructive nature of nudify apps. One other descriptor that should be included is Single-Minded Marketing.

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Can AI Advertising be the Real Thing?

12/1/2024

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by David Hagenbuch - professor of marketing at Messiah University -
author of Honorable Influence - founder of Mindful Marketing

Coca-Cola has a long history of very memorable holiday ads, from its iconic Coke-swigging Santa to the surprisingly peaceful polar bears. This year’s campaign seeks to capture similar feelings of goodwill, warmth, and cheer but with AI-generated output, which raises the question: Should the company that’s touted its product as the real thing for more than a century now be creating advertising that’s not?

Longer-tenured consumers like me remember Coca-Cola’s longstanding tagline “The Real Thing,” which the company leaned on heavily in the 1970s following its successful 1969 campaign, “Can’t Beat The Real Thing.” Actually, the company had articulated the theme even earlier, e.g., on painted signs in the 1940s.

The notion that Coke is the real thing, or the original cola, can be traced to the late 1800s: Coke came to market in 1886, 12 years before its archrival Pepsi, giving Coca-Cola not only first-mover advantage but the right to boast that any cola coming after it was a mere facsimile.

The word real hasn’t appeared in all the company’s advertising, yet Coca-Cola has always sought to position itself as authentic and genuine – distinct branding threads that have woven their way through the company’s varied promotion, particularly in its holiday ads.

For instance, the look of the Santa Claus character that many know and love is largely a Coca-Cola creation. In 1931, the company and D'Arcy Advertising Agency tapped Haddon Sundblom, a Michigan-born Illustrator, to create images of Santa Claus for the firm’s ads.

Before then, Santa Claus was often depicted as “everything from a tall gaunt man to a spooky-looking elf.” Sundblom, however, took inspiration from Clement Clark Moore's 1822 poem "A Visit From St. Nicholas" (aka “Twas the Night Before Christmas”) to transform Santa’s image into what’s typical today – “a warm, friendly, pleasantly plump and human Santa.” Such an inviting persona meshed seamlessly with Coca-Cola’s wholesome brand image and helped to further propagate its portrayal as the real thing.

Beside his appealing personality, Sundblom Santa’s bright red hat and coat, their white trim, and his full white beard also placed him squarely on-brand in terms of colors, and the company used the holiday character heavily over the next several decades.

In 1993, Coca-Cola introduced another endearing creation – animated polar bears. Although the company had used a polar bear in a French print ad in 1922, the bears that Coca-Cola creator Ken Stewart designed in the early 1990s developed a much longer-lasting legacy.

In their first television commercial, about sixteen furry white polar bears, each holding a bottle of Coke, sat contently on the artic tundra, oohing and ahhing as they watched the aurora borealis (northern lights). Near the end of the 30-second spot, they sipped their sodas, smacked their lips, and let out one more collective ahh. The commercial culminated with a close-up of one particularly pleasant bear with plump cheeks and friendly eyes that seemed to smile for the camera as it held its frosty soda bottle high.

In another 90-second spot from around 2005, the bears crashed the Christmas party of a pack of penguins that were dancing to the Beach Boys’ holiday favorite “Little Saint Nick.” At first the penguins were startled, but after one of their chicks shared a bottle of Coke with a bear cub, everyone smiled and happily joined the festivities. Leave it to Coca-Cola to make even one of the world’s fiercest predators fit its brand.

Even as the polar bears’ popularity grew, in 1995 the company unfurled another memorable campaign called “Holidays are Coming” that featured a seemingly endless caravan of light-bedazzled and ornately decorated 18-wheel big rigs sporting Coca-Cola’s trademark script lettering and larger-than-life images of its affable Santa Claus.

The spectacular line of long haulers rolled down country roads to the chant of “holidays are coming,” lighting up forests and bridges as they passed and pleasantly surprising a variety of delighted onlookers. Although certain parts of these mid-1990s ads leveraged special effects, much of what viewers saw was real, including the people in the spots.

Thirty years later, these “Holidays are Coming” ads are the inspiration for the company’s new AI-generated campaign, which carry the same name and decked-out trucks but haven’t engendered the same warm response as the original ads.

Produced by three different AI studios, the three new AI-generated ads, have received some very frosty reviews. As the New York Times has reported, one critic called the ads “slop” that “ruins the Christmas spirit,” while another claimed the company has significantly lowered its standards with the “heartbreaking” campaign, and a third, Alan Hirsch, the creator of the animated TV show Gravity Falls, suggested Coca-Cola’s signature red represents “the blood of out-of-work artists.”

So, why risk messing with a good thing and the Real Thing by using AI to produce the new ads? A main motivation was likely money, as Garrett Sloan writing for AdAge suggested: “Backers of the technology are excited about how it could bring more creative tools to more people, more cheaply.”

It’s easy to imagine that Coca-Cola’s original “Holidays are Coming” ads, with their elaborately decorated trucks, remote outdoor settings, and abundant special effects, were very expensive to produce – probably millions of dollars – and took a long time to script, schedule, shoot, and edit. Why shouldn’t the company leverage technology’s cutting edge to save time and trim expenses?

Asking that question seems to fly in the face of the conclusion of my last Mindful Marketing article, “Does Human Made Matter?” in which I deduced, Yes, it matters. So, why was AI use out-of-bounds a few weeks ago but in-play now?

While some suggest that AI shouldn’t be used for anything and others argue that all AI use is acceptable, I stand between the two extremes. I’m firmly in the middle but will lean a little closer to one side or the other based on the efficacy of the application and the ethics of the situation.

As the last Mindful Marketing article suggested, many value originality in art and appreciate a sense of personal connection with the art’s creator, such as ones stemming from shared life experiences. Human connections and true originality are both things that are difficult if not impossible for AI to replicate.

On the other hand, most people probably don’t mind if AI generated a promotional email they received or was used to create a billboard they read.

The ultimate purpose of most advertising is to sell products, so although advertising is part science and part art, it doesn’t have the same thresholds for originality and personal connection as pure art does. Most people probably feel a deeper human connection with a favorite painting or song than they do with a Coca-Cola promotional piece. The notion that there’s a different standard for commercial content opens the door for AI use in advertising.

Someone who sees firsthand the effective and ethical use that marketing can make of AI is Matt Caylor, Account Director with Martin Communications, Inc., located near Harrisburg, PA. While he warns against blindly accepting AI output, which can be dangerous because it’s not always correct, Caylor also has experienced many productive uses of the technology including copy iteration, data analysis, and design assistance, as he explains:

“The technology can save time in editing and design, taking some of the mundane or tedious work off our plates. It can work as a partner in the initial iteration of messaging, often acting as an agent to bounce ideas off. It can be an agile assistant that reviews and analyzes large data sets, crunches numbers, or helps develop new queries.”

Does human input matter to Caylor and others at Martin Communications? It surely does, and like many others working in marketing, Caylor and his colleagues are continually learning how to effectively integrate their own insights with the technology tools – just as humans have done for millennia.

So, does it matter if Coca-Cola’s “Holidays are Coming” ads aren’t the Real Thing. Yes and no.

It matters in that consumers’ perceptions, whether correct or not, are their reality. For instance, some viewers seem to believe that all the people in the ads are AI-generated, even though Pratik Thakar, Coca-Cola’s VP and global head of generative AI, says at least some are not. Still, when people perceive a little AI in an ad, their tendency is to extrapolate that everything in it is AI.

On the other hand, Coca-Cola is only doing what Caylor and individuals in many other fields do each day – use AI selectively and responsibly to leverage their own time and talents. As Thakar explains: “Our human creatives make decisions and use AI as a tool.”

There’s nothing inherently wrong with Coca-Cola’s using AI as a tool to help create its new “Holidays are Coming” ads. However, given individuals’ current impressions of AI, because people have special expectations for authenticity around the Holidays, and since Coca-Cola has built a reputation for realism, the company’s AI use in the ads may have been too much too soon, or a case of Simple-Minded Marketing.

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Making Money from People Who Talk Funny

6/29/2024

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by David Hagenbuch - professor of marketing at Messiah University -
author of Honorable Influence - founder of Mindful Marketing

“Don’t make fun of the way others talk.” It’s a rule most of us learn early in life, but apparently not all advertisers have adopted it. Humorous ads can be entertaining and effective, but is it okay for them to poke fun at the speech patterns of specific people groups?

As a marketing professor, I probably pay more attention to advertising than most people do, which sometimes leads to seeing similarities among ads and noticing interesting trends. I recently saw several video spots, all from different advertisers, each lampooning the ways specific nationalities/ethnicities communicate:

It’s important to note that each portrayal is intended to be funny, which is certainly common for national ads – think Super Bowl commercials. But like beauty, humor is in the eyes and ears of the beholder, so when do commercials move from silly/stupid, to annoying/irritating, to distasteful/objectionable, to repugnant/offensive? Or, more specifically, when does mocking people’s accents become unethical?

Like communication in general, humor is highly contextual, which is why there are inside jokes that only people aware of a specific backstory understand. Mocking accents can be acceptable and even desirable in certain contexts of social intimacy. For instance, two friends – one from New York City and the other from Boston – might playfully tease each other about their different food preferences, favorite sports teams, and distinct ways of speaking.

With advertising, backstories aren’t between just a few people; rather there’s common knowledge and shared experiences among people regionally, nationally, or even globally, some of which are positive and others, negative. Advertisers should be especially sensitive to the latter.

At some point in their lives, most people probably have had someone comment on the way they talk, perhaps in a complimentary way or maybe critically. However, some people endure daily comments about their accents that often turn into ridicule and even racism. Unfortunately, it’s not hard to find examples of such verbal abuse online, like the following:

Terry Nguyen is an effective writer, but she thinks twice before speaking because she sometimes mispronounces words, which came from growing a home with two Vietnamese parents who spoke rough English.
Sharada Vishwanath tells the story of a classmate imitating her Indian accent, which began as lighthearted and fun but quickly changed to annoying and offensive, as the agitator mentioned the words curry and cheaper.

Belittling people because of the way they talk can be “linguistic racism,” which in work environments may cause those targeted to refrain from speaking and to miss opportunities for professional advancement.

So, do the commercials mentioned at the onset represent linguistic racism? Possibly. An important distinction is whether depictions are of race vs. ethnicity vs. nationality. Another issue is that not all accent imitation is the same – as mentioned earlier, the interpretation of any communication is partly a function of the backstory, or broader context.

Historically, in many English-speaking western nations, people of color from places like Asia, Africa, and Latin America have been the recipients of far more accent abuse than Europeans whose first language is not English. For Terry and Shandra, mentioned above, criticism of their speaking is not a one-off experience but a regular occurrence.

Over the past century, television shows and movies have cast Asian, Black, Latino, and Native American actors and often had them speak broken and improper English, which has contributed to shameful stereotypes of people of color being less intelligent and more socially inept.

One common troupe is that of an Asian who adds “ee” to the ends of words (e.g., “talkee”), omits definite articles (e.g., this, that), and replaces L’s with R’s (e.g. Herro instead of Hello). In one of its final scenes, the classic Christmas movie A Christmas Story employs this Asian stereotyping.

Indians are also frequently stereotyped for a particular style of English speaking. Such accent mocking is what led The Office’s Kelly Kapoor in Season 1 to slap her bigoted boss Michael Scott. For decades, the animated TV show The Simpsons lampooned Indians through its reoccurring character Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, until he was finally removed from the show in 2017. Imitation of Indian accents is so common that there is a word for it – brown voice.

Ridicule is bad enough, but “At worst, linguistic racism can lead to deprivation in education, employment, health and housing,” as benefits and opportunities are sometimes withheld from those who talk differently. Perpetuating negative perceptions easily leads to social stigmas that carry significant physical and economic consequences.

However, mockery of the accents of French, Dutch, Germans, and other Europeans who are not native English speakers is not only much less common, when comments about their accents are offered, they usually take on a different tenor. Their speech is more often complimented as sounding cute, sexy, or sophisticated, whereas that of Asians and Indians tends to be criticized for grammatical errors and pronunciation mistakes.

So, does this asymmetry in experience make it acceptable to mock Europeans’ accents? I’d like to offer three reasons why it does not:

1. People are still hurt. Isabelle Duff, a native of Ireland whose job took her to London, recounts how she often felt harassed by coworkers who continually imitated her Irish accent. Scottish actor Billy Boyd, who played “Pippin” in Lord of the Rings, refuses roles, common in scripts, that call for an incomprehensible Scottish accent, which is an unfair and demeaning stereotype of Scots. A similar example is the unintelligible babble of Sesame Street’s Swedish Chef, who many Swedes don’t find funny.

2. Wrong for one should mean wrong for all. There aren’t many examples in ethics where compelling cases can be made that it’s okay to harm certain groups of people, but not others. A proponent of capital punishment might argue it’s right to execute murders but not others; however, murders aren’t a distinct, demographically identifiable people group. Also, unlike Scots, Irish, and Swedes, murderers have done things that arguably warrant differential treatment.

3. Don’t imply permission. People expect consistency. If a parent tells one child they can stay up late, their sibling will expect the same privilege. So, if it’s acceptable to mock Scots, some people will deduce that it’s okay to mock Indians too. The safest approach is to not offer any basis for making that inference by maintaining that it’s inappropriate to mock the speech of any people group.

When we open our mouths to speak, funny things sometimes come out. It’s okay to laugh about those silly sounds and statements with people we know, in the right context, and with pure intent.

However, the standards that fit individual incidences cannot be morally stretched to cover broad cases involving the accents of entire people groups. Although it may seem funny and be effective, advertising that mocks the speech of any race, ethnicity, or other demographic should be considered “Single-Minded Marketing.”

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Does Selling Love Risk Relationships?

6/4/2024

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by David Hagenbuch - professor of marketing at Messiah University -
author of Honorable Influence - founder of Mindful Marketing

Love, exciting and new . . . come aboard, we’re expecting you. Those lyrics from one of the most popular TV sitcoms of the 1970s – ABC’s The Love Boat – are a reminder that people have long-been fascinated with others’ romances. Offering entertainment that people enjoy is a good thing, but are new marketing strategies for monetizing love courting immorality?

A former student of mine, Kaylee Enck, recently messaged me to ask my opinion about a rom-com. I’m not the best person for questions about romantic cinema, but Kaylee wasn’t really interested in my perspective on the movie, Anyone But You; she wanted to know my thoughts about a very unconventional tactic used to promote the film, as she explained:

“The movie went viral because everyone thought the two leads had fallen in love with each other off-screen---even though both were in serious, committed relationships with other people at the time. They played the ruse really well. It's hard to know if it was the pretend relationship or something else, but the male lead's real-life finance actually called off their engagement. A few days ago, it was revealed that the whole thing was a marketing ploy invented by Sydney Sweeney, the lead actress and an executive producer on the film.”

With Kaylee’s clear event summary and some additional background from a link she provided, I was glad to offer my perspective:

Thank you for sharing this story. It seems like a very lowly strategy both because of the wide-spread intentional deceit and the negative impact on real relationships. As I think of broader issues involved, the strategy may reflect a growing tendency to put work ahead of the people in our lives and a willingness to do anything for money or fame.

Kaylee thanked me for my reply, and we could have been done there, but her question got me thinking . . . the markets for products related to love are many and huge! Besides certain movies genres, there are dozens of other products that are often, if not always, connected to love, for instance:

Television shows: old ones e.g., the Love Boat, the Dating Game, soap operas, and new ones e.g., 90-Day Fiancé, the Bachelor, the Bachelorette, Golden Bachelor, Love Island
Plays/musicals
Songs: so much music has been written about love
Books: romance novels
Dating apps
Greeting cards
Flowers
Candy
Romantic dinners
Jewelry: particularly engagement rings and wedding rings
Clothing: wedding apparel, lingerie
Wedding venues
Wedding photography
Honeymoons
Perfume and cologne
Toothpaste and mouthwash
Teeth whitening
Makeup
Hair and skincare products
Cosmetic surgery

There are likely more, but this is at least a good start for a list that can be categorized in several different ways e.g., goods vs. services, romantic love vs. friendship love. Another way to slice it is products that offer a direct, personal love benefit vs. a vicarious one i.e., enjoying someone else’s love experience. Dating apps and wedding rings are the former, while rom-coms and romance novels are the latter.

Is one of these value propositions (direct or vicarious) more moral than the other? Probably not. Just as it’s great that resorts offer honeymoon vacation packages for newlyweds, it’s nice that people who enjoy romance novels can read about couples going on their honeymoons. Buyers and sellers of both benefit without anything being inherently unethical.

Then, what’s wrong with a business model based on love?

That’s not a rhetorical question – There are, unfortunately, many specific ways such a model can be misappropriated, but the general downfall is when profit takes precedent over people and individuals are injured physically, emotionally, or relationally.

Sometimes called “the oldest profession,” prostitution is the classic example of such harm and the reason why historically most societies have considered harlotry immoral. Even if there are two ostensibly willing parties, this selling of “love” causes relational harm to family members of those involved in the act, as well as broader harm to the family as a societal institution.

Movie and TV show sex scenes are another example of potential harm. Even if camera angles and editing suggest more to physical intimacy than actually occurs, the actors involved in the loveless, commitment-less contact expose themselves to what may be lasting emotional harm, as Nedra Gallegos, an instructor at the Los Angeles Campus of the New York Film Academy, implies: “The narrative may be fictional, but the contact is real.”

Unlike the previous two examples, the issue with Anyone But You was not overtly sex but rather the costars putting the success of their movie ahead of their own real relationships/significant others. In this instance, the relational harm was direct, as suggested by the breakup of actor Glen Powell and his girlfriend Gigi Paris.

I'd shared with Kaylee my opinion of the movie’s marketing tactics, but I really wanted to hear hers, since she’s a communications and marketing professional who knows more about the rom-com genre than I do. Here’s her perspective, which is influenced by her Christian faith:

“What marketing really boils down to providing value to the consumer. What is more valuable to us as humans than love, though? When tapping into that sacred emotion, one has to do so cautiously, because no matter how hard we try, no product/service we offer can actually bring someone lasting love---only our relationships, especially our relationship with Christ, can provide that. Transparent, honest advertising, even if not as monetarily successful in the here-and-now, will always win out in the end.”

Her admonitions for transparency and not allowing anything to replace real relationships are great ones for everyone. Coincidentally, they are also consistent with some other Love Boat theme song lyrics that identify love as “life’s sweetest reward,” and that prioritize love that “won't hurt anymore.”

There are good ways that marketing can help start, strengthen, and celebrate real relationships, as well as provide edifying relationship-focused entertainment. However, even effective strategies that place profit ahead of people are “Single-Minded Marketing.”

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What a Mouse Can Teach Us About Morality

1/8/2024

11 Comments

by David Hagenbuch - professor of marketing at Messiah University -
author of Honorable Influence - founder of Mindful Marketing

It’s interesting that among the billions of people born into this world, most seem to learn the same first words: “Mommy,” “Daddy,” “No,” and “Mine!” Protecting one’s own property and respecting others’ property are crucial for a functioning society, so when a near century old copyright expires on a cartoon mouse, should anyone be free to use it however they want?

Steamboat Wille, the 1928 animated short film by Disney founder and namesake Walt Disney and animator/cartoonist Ub Iwerks, entered the public domain this past January 1, which means that after 95 years, the earliest version of Mickey Mouse is now “free for all to copy, share, and build upon.”

It’s no surprise that on a planet full of creative and entrepreneurial people, wheels were already turning before public domain day 2024 toward ways of monetizing the newly liberated mouse. Some of those ways would probably make Walt shudder.

One company has announced a violence-filled video game featuring Mickey, while a movie producer/director is planning a Steamboat Willie horror film. Both beg the question:

Is it right to turn Mickey Mouse into a slasher?

Such as question may make some wonder – Doesn’t the Walt Disney Company have a say in this? Can’t the “happiest place on earth” stop someone from making a maniacal Mickey?

To understand Disney’s control over Mickey Mouse, it’s important to distinguish two related but sometimes conflated intellectual property terms: copyrights and trademarks.

Copyrights – Protect “original works of authorship as soon as an author fixes the work in a tangible form of expression,” which means in a fairly permanent way, such as by writing it down, recording it, or taking a picture of it. To be protected, works must possess some minimal amount of creativity. Included are things like poems, musical compositions, books, photos, paintings, blog posts, computer programs, and movies.

The length of copyright protection varies. In general, works created before January 1, 1978, have protection for 95 years, while those created on or after the same date are protected for the lifetime of the author/creator plus 70 years.

Like other works created in 1928, Steamboat Willie’s copyright expired after 95 years and entered the public domain on January 1, 2024.

Trademarks – Are words, phrases, designs, symbols, or some combination thereof, used to differentiate one company’s goods from others in the same category. The more creative and unique a trademark, the better protection it affords.

Anyone can place a “TM” next to a special graphic or phrase they’re using to identify their unique product. To gain more complete legal protection, firms can register their trademark with the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) and if approved, the unique identifier can be paired with the ® symbol, indicating that it is a registered trademark.

Unlike copyrights, registered trademarks never expire, but to keep them active, firms must continue to use their trademarks in commerce as well as “file certain documents at regular intervals” to show that they’re continuing to use them.

The PTO has a trademark search tool on its site that allows anyone interested to search the Office’s extensive database of “live” (active) and “dead” (inactive) trademarks. A search for “Mickey Mouse” yields over 49,600 results, some alive and some dead trademarks.

The Walt Disney Company and Disney Enterprises, Inc. are responsible for many of the Mickey Mouse registrations, each of which tends to be specific to a particular category of products, such as:

Jewelry; watches
Action figures and accessories
Bathing suits; dresses; gloves; hats; caps; jackets; pajamas
Balloons; Christmas tree decorations
Plush toys and jigsaw puzzles.

In short, Disney has a registered trademark for just about any product on which it would likely want to place the words “Mickey Mouse.” The company also has many live and pending trademarks for “Disney Mickey & Co.,” which include a contemporary Mickey Mouse graphic. It would seem, therefore, that Disney is at little risk of losing rights to its heavily trademarked modern Mickey.

In contrast, Steamboat Willie and a few of Walt’s other short films featuring the first Mickey Mouse were protected by copyright, but the early Mickey apparently was not trademarked. So, legally it’s possible to create a violent video game and a horror film with Steamboat Willie.

As evidence, a very similar situation unfolded just two years ago on January 1, 2022, when the characters from A.A. Milne’s 1926 classic “Winnie-the-Pooh” entered the public domain. The next year, writer/director Rhys Frake-Waterfield made the slasher film “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey.” What’s more, a sequel is due to be released later this year. Ironically, the owner of the copyrights to the Pooh characters is/was . . . the Disney corporation.

Cases like these are good reminders that just because something is legal doesn’t necessarily mean it’s ethical. Historic examples of misalignment between legality and morality include the state-sponsored persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany and laws that promoted racial segregation in the United States before the Civil Rights Movement.

So, even if law allows, should Steamboat Willie be cast as a video game or horror film slasher? For people who don’t appreciate those genres, the easy answer is “no,” but what if Willie were made into a short-selling stockbroker, a hard-nose football coach, a doctor with curt bedside manner, an aggressive trial lawyer, etc.?

Although most people probably would not regard those roles as being as blatantly bad as a horror film slasher, they’re still big departures from the whimsical, fun-loving mouse that Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks created, that's the ancestor of the brand character that represents wholesomeness and joy for many, and that serves as a strong connection to fond memories with family and friends.

So, the question about creative works no longer covered by copyright law is this:

Even if law allows for their free use, is it right for others to use them in ways that denigrate, disparage, misrepresent, or malign what the original author intended and, in many cases, invested considerable time and talent to create conceptually then tangibly?

Certainly, the work’s author and their heirs are one very important stakeholder group to consider. Although the author will be deceased by the time their work enters the public domain, their legacy lives on and doesn’t deserve to be tarnished.

Another primary group of stakeholders are the people who enjoy the work. They would like to continue to appreciate it, if not in its original form, then in one that honors and extends its positive perceptions.

There’s also the notion of respecting the work for its own sake. Just like most would consider it wrong to shout during an orchestra performance, deface a painting, litter a pristine landscape, or talk on a cellphone during a play, it also might be considered poor taste to pejoratively alter a creative work.

Human beings are unique in their capacity to create. The creative process is almost always a collective endeavor – if individuals are not working together directly, then they are sharing/borrowing ideas and gaining inspiration from others across distance and time.

It’s good to accept and contribute to the collective nature of the creative process. It’s also important to respect what others create by not deprecating their work in material ways that might produce a lasting negative impact.

Casting Steamboat Willie as a serial killer may be legal, but morally it’s gross degradation of a time-honored creative work that’s closely connected to a trusted brand, which makes the projected horror film and violent videogame strategies “Single-Minded Marketing.”

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Has Tipping Reached a Tipping Point?

8/26/2023

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by David Hagenbuch - professor of marketing at Messiah University -
author of Honorable Influence - founder of Mindful Marketing

There are many ways people are rewarded for good work, but few are as immediate as monetary tips. Restaurant servers have long received confirmation and big parts of their compensation from gratuities, but recently many other service providers have started tapping the same propensity for generosity. Given that these increasingly common appeals have become off-putting to some, it may be time to ask: Has tipping been taken too far?

The New York Times recently described a case in which, after some cosmetic medical treatments, a reader’s dermatologist asked her for a tip. If some physicians are soliciting gratuities, is it only time until other professionals start doing the same? Should professors like me put out tip jars?

We’ve all added a tip to a restaurant check, handed cash to a bellhop, or Venmoed a little extra money to another service provider. While physical tip jars have become increasingly common on retail store counters, digital technology has made it extremely easy for anyone accepting electronic forms of payment, in person or from afar, to casually ask for extra cash.

For instance, I recently placed an online order to pick up dinner from Chipotle. When I went to check out, just below the order total a prompt appeared: “Tip the Crew – Show some love to the team that prepares your order.” As I’ve grown accustomed to doing, I clicked one of the tip amounts but not without thinking, “Do I really need to?”

A decade or two ago, one would usually only tip in a sit-down restaurant where a waiter or waitress took your order, brought your drinks and food, stopped by your table to see if you needed anything else, delivered the check, and processed your payment. As the word “gratuity” suggests, your tip was a way of saying thanks for their multipronged service, and the amount you gave was a way of expressing how good you thought the service was.

In the case of Chipotle, no one did any of the aforementioned things for me, so it seemed reasonable to wonder, “Who exactly am I tipping and why?” The easy answers to these questions are the restaurant staff that prepared the food and placed it in the carryout containers because they work hard for low wages, but even if those inputs and circumstances warrant tipping, how similar are they to those of other occupations that are also now panning for tips, including at least one dermatologist?

The complexities and potential inequities in tipping are further illustrated in examples like this one in Sanibel, FL. A couple of years ago, Island Cow, a popular restaurant on the island, was ordered to pay $222,000 to 48 employees because it created an illegal tip pool that “required tipped employees to share earnings with non-tipped workers, including dishwashing assistants and kitchen expeditors.”

This incident and others like it prompt a variety of questions and concerns including:

Do tips always make it to their intended parties?
Do owners sometimes pocket tips for themselves?
Do workers who don’t deal directly with customers deserve to be tipped?
Why don’t companies just pay their employees more so they don’t need to receive tips?

The last question may simply seem hypothetical, but a recent visit to Europe reminded me how services can be delivered effectively with just base pay and little or no tipping. A few times, when dining out in France, I received my check, which had no place to add gratuity. When I asked how I could leave a tip, the waiter/waitress replied that tipping wasn’t necessary.

Of course, that norm is not indicative of every restaurant in France, and it’s certainly not true across all Europe, where the likelihood of tipping varies widely from rather unlikely in Norway (14.3%) and France (39.9%) to very likely in Sweden (82.8%) and Germany (96.7%).

Whether in the United States or abroad, the total wages that service providers earn should have some bearing on whether or not they’re tipped. While the question of whether customers are being asked to subsidize the poor wages from employers is a fair one, it also might be moot because when employers are forced to pay higher wages, they often pass those increased costs on to customers in the form of higher prices.

So why not do away with tipping entirely and just pay more for restaurant meals, etc.? Theoretically, tipping provides value to customers because it allows them to adjust the amount they pay based on the quality of service they receive. Meanwhile, service providers have an incentive to do their jobs better, as they gain feedback about how well they’re performing. However, in reality, those benefits may not accrue for several reasons:

Feelings of obligation: Even if service is very poor, patrons may feel obligated to offer an average tip, so they don’t seem cheap or unempathetic.
Product prices: When customers believe they’re already paying a lot for something, they’ll sometimes scale back their tips – like the person who told me that while they typically tip for everything, they don’t always tip at Starbucks because they’re already paying $5.00 for a coffee.
Poor timing: As suggested by my Chipotle example above, some companies ask for tips before the service has been completed. In those cases, your order may come out completely wrong, but you’ve already given a tip.

Despite several decades of work experience, I’ve never been in an occupation that received tips, which made me eager to hear from those who have. So, I reached out to two of my current students who have considerable food industry server experience.

Sarah Schall has worked in a variety of retail occupations, including as a counter-service food worker and as a waitress. She makes the important point that particularly in a sit-down restaurant, one’s overall dining experience is a function of many employees’ contributions, which should impact how patrons approach tipping:

“Although the waiter/waitress is the one who may seem to be in charge of a guest’s entire experience, it’s important to remember that there are many team members who go into creating a dining experience. Therefore, it wouldn’t be right to lower the tip that’s going to the server if the food took a while due to a slow kitchen staff.”

“If the food wasn’t up to par, or if it took a long time to get to the table, it most likely was the kitchen staff at fault rather than the waitress. Instead of leaving a poor tip, guests should inform the waiter/waitress that they were disappointed with their meal so that way the restaurant can improve and the server can work to reconcile the problem.”

Josh McCleaf grew up in the restaurant industry, working in a variety of front- and back-of-house positions in his family’s multigenerational restaurant. This experience has given him particular appreciation for the multifaceted and prolonged engagement servers have with customers in traditional dining:

“When you sit down at a table-service restaurant, you expect your server to spend the next 45 to 90 minutes getting you drinks, refills, meals, extra napkins, sides of ranch, and anything else you might need for your dining experience. It's also important to note that your server is not only fulfilling the needs of your table during your visit, they are also trying to fill the needs of every other table in their section at the same time.”

McCleaf contrasts this typical sit-down dining scenario with his own recent experience as a counter-service customer:

“A few weeks ago, I walked up to a Cinnabon stand in a mall to purchase two bottles of water. While the transaction was short and the water was only an arm's length away from the cashier, I was still faced with the increasingly popular iPad flip and a prompt asking me if I'd like to leave a tip. I have to admit that this put me in an odd position, and I was left to answer some questions: Was this one-minute interaction and simple order worthy of a 20% tip? Even if it wasn't, how bad would it look if I said no?”

McCleaf likens this incident to experiences patrons have at quick-service restaurants where interactions last for just three to five minutes and are “one and done,” i.e., people order, pay, receive their food, and leave, which is much different than the sustained engagement with servers in sit-down dining.

However, McCleaf emphasizes that even in these faster service restaurant formats, good customer service is vital, as servers who demonstrate dedication to their work, strong communication skills, enthusiasm, and patience may be well-deserving of tips. He concludes:

“What's important is that you tip at your own discretion. You should never be guilted into leaving a tip at these kinds of establishments.”

His admonition is a good one: guilt, fear, and other strong-handed emotional appeals represent coercion and aren’t appropriate for marketers to use. I’d add that organizations should be sensitive to how the tipping choices they offer, or don’t, can remove customers’ control and force their decision-making.

For instance, our family recently ate at a sit-down dining restaurant where when paying the bill, the lowest tip listed among the iPad’s preset choices was 20%. While I was happy to offer more than that amount, and I believe that servers deserve more for the hard work they do, it struck me as being too prescriptive – Why shouldn’t a patron be able to more easily offer any amount that reflects their satisfaction with the service they received?

To be true to its nature and intent, tipping must remain a discretionary thing – while it certainly should be encouraged, it shouldn’t be compelled.

Anyone who has the ability to tip generously should do so, but ultimately, consumers deserve: 1) to decide without pressure how much they’d like to tip, 2) to make their choice, ideally, after they’ve received the service, and 3) to know, with some assurance, who will receive their gratuity. Discounting these ingredients for equitable tipping is a recipe for “Single-Minded Marketing.”

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How Data Analytics Find You

7/19/2023

23 Comments

by David Hagenbuch - professor of marketing at Messiah University -
author of Honorable Influence - founder of Mindful Marketing

As a marketing educator, I take some pride in understanding organizations’ marketing and sharing it with others. However, two unexpected emails from unfamiliar online retailers left this professor perplexed and led me to reach out to a former student to teach me what had happened.

It was a Saturday evening when the emails hit my inbox within minutes of each other. They caught my attention because both were from furniture retailers that I never heard of before. Although I hadn’t been shopping for furniture, I knew my wife had been online helping our son find furnishings.

I asked her if she recognized the retailers. She said she had visited their websites earlier that day but hadn’t purchased anything or provided any contact information. Nonetheless, she also had started receiving emails from them.

Most of us have experienced the remarketing that happens when we search for a specific product online and soon after, ads for the same product start appearing on webpages we visit. However, that kind of digital targeting is typically confined to websites; it doesn’t lead to us receiving emails since we didn’t provide an email address.

While I was surprised that my wife had received emails from the two retailers, I was baffled by how I’d been added to their lists.

I understood that it’s easy for companies to access data linking our email addresses to our internet protocol (IP) address, “the unique identifying number assigned to every device connected to the Internet.” That connection is evident each time we complete an online form that asks for our email address, among other personal information.

Companies that don’t harvest that data themselves also can buy it from those who do. The market for data brokering is huge – now a $138.9 billion industry that’s expected to top $229 billion by 2025.

Big tech companies like Facebook and Google, as well as credit bureaus like Equifax and Experian, are among the biggest players in the data collection market. These organizations often say they don’t sell customer data; rather, they “share” it with their advertising partners. Of course, advertisers pay these big data collecting companies to run their ads, so selling vs. sharing seems like semantics.

Having exhausted the extent of my digital data-sharing knowledge, I turned to an expert. Dan Shaffer was once a BIS major and a student in my Marketing Principles class. He’s since risen to Director of Marketing Operations at WebFX one of the world’s leading digital marketing companies. I asked him how the two furniture retailers, who were completely unknown to me, could have gotten my email address.

Shaffer said that the companies were likely using https://retention.com/ to tie my IP back to my email addresses via brokered data – a process that started when at some point my email address and IP address were paired, probably from an online form I filled or an email newsletter to which I subscribed sometime ago.

Even though my wife and I use different devices to access the Internet, and each device has its own unique IPv6, the first 14 digits of that number are the same for every device in our household. So, a company with data from both my wife and from me could connect our datasets and target not just an individual shopper but as Shaffer described, our “household’s browsing history and interests.”

So, to summarize, the two unknown furniture retailers found me by using a very specialized analytics service (Retention.com) that: cross-referenced myriads of data it either harvested itself or purchased from others, found correlations among my wife’s and my separate online activities, and used those connections to paint a digital picture of our household.

That’s a simplified view of what happened and how. Given the moral focus of Mindful Marketing, the bigger question is, should it have happened? Was it right for the two furniture retailers and Retention.com to put my wife on their email list and target me?

It’s interesting that Retention.com dedicates an entire webpage to answering the question, How is Retention.com Legal? Who else does that? Does your employer take time to explain why it’s legal? An organization that does so naturally makes us ask: Should I be worried? Are there reasons why this business may not be legitimate?

Retention.com makes a case for the legitimacy of its practices with a variety of alleged facts including:

According to the US CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 you do NOT need an opt-in to send email marketing in the USA. In Europe, you do; but in the US, you don’t.
To be CAN-SPAM compliant, all you need is an opt-out link in the communication, and you need to make it clear that it’s an advertisement, along with a few other requirements (see below).

The webpage goes on to discuss that the conventional definition of SPAM is email that is both unsolicited and bulk. However, Retention.com argues against that definition because although it comes from Spamhaus, which is “an important, and influential organization in Email Marketing,” “Spamhaus is NOT the US government.”

At the same time, Retention.com also claims that it complies with Spamhaus’ definition because it provides “verifiable consent, ie, a third-party opt-in date and time, and the URL of our partner website that they opted in to.”

Furthermore, the site argues that the emails sent thanks to its services comply with the main requirements of the Federal Trade Commission’s CAN-SPAM act:

No false or misleading header information
No deceptive subject lines
Identifying the message as an ad
Telling recipients where the sender is located
Telling recipients how to opt out of receiving future emails
Honor opt-out request promptly
Monitor what others are doing on your behalf

To Retention.com’s credit, I can confirm that the emails I received from the two furniture retailers complied with most of the seven stipulations above. However, one significant falsity appeared at the top of each email: “You’re receiving this email because you stopped by our site. Unsubscribe”

Before I received the first email from them, I didn’t even know these retailers existed; I certainly never visited their websites.

Given that my wife did browse the sites, perhaps the retailer and Retention.com could argue that “you” is plural, i.e., ‘you people,’ or ‘your household.’ Of course, even individuals in the same family or household often have very different personalities, preferences, and internet use patterns.

Why would a company want to risk annoying, alienating, or even offending potential customers, given the possibility that by targeting households one of the following could happen:

Spoil a surprise – What if my wife was hoping to surprise me with some new piece of furniture? Well, she can’t now!
Reveal sensitive information – Others don’t need to know that someone in their household is looking into treatment for a certain medical condition or for an attorney, a therapist, protection from domestic abuse, etc.

Besides being dishonest (“you stopped by our site”), it seems like Retention.com and these furniture retailers are taking a step backward in terms of best practices in marketing.

Ever since marketing began as a science in the mid-1900s, marketers have continually worked to refine their target markets, i.e., tailor them more and more to the needs of specific individuals vs. amorphous groups.

Now that digital media have enabled true one-to-one marketing and mass customization, why turn back the clock?

At the same time, I realize that Retention.com, like many digital marketers, is playing a numbers game. It doesn’t need to get my business for its clients. As long as its shotgun approach gets 15-20% of recipients to open the unsolicited emails and even smaller percentages to visit the retailers’ sites and make purchases, it’s probably providing ROI.

On its ‘right to exist’ page, Retention.com poses a rhetorical question that compares Spamhaus’ guidance to what’s legal:
Why abide by this definition, even though it’s considerably more restrictive than the law?

This question cuts to the heart of the difference between law and ethics and evokes a time-honored moral truism: Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

First, there is at least one reason to believe that Retention.com’s practices do run afoul of the law, specifically concerning the Federal Trade Commission’s standard for truth in advertising, which mandates that “Under the law, claims in advertisements must be truthful, cannot be deceptive or unfair . . .” (1) Since I never visited the two furniture retailers’ sites, to say I did is blatantly untruthful.

Second, even if Retention.com is given a legal pass, it’s practices still raise moral questions, e.g., What really represents ‘opting in,’ and how might less-than-transparent and/or manipulative systems mislead or coerce consumers?

For instance, at some point months or years before, my wife and/or I may have clicked “yes” on terms-of-use agreements that in an array of opaque legalese said that certain companies could “share” our customer information.

Is there really informed consent when you have 1) practically no idea with whom your data will be shared and for what purposes and 2) you’ve been shopping online for a long time, the terms-of-use agreement is the last thing you need to check off before completing the purchase, and the agreement is 10 pages long, in 8-point type, single-spaced?

Just because a company like Retention.com can “legally” assimilate reams of data, find connections, and sell those association services to others, should it? Instances of deception and possible coercion suggest, “no.”

Despite my own unpleasant experience and critical analysis, Retention.com probably is helping to convert a small percentage of surprised email recipients to customers for its clients, making its data amalgamation and email inundation approach “Single-Minded Marketing.”

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Is Extreme Tourism Worth Its Costs?

7/3/2023

10 Comments

by David Hagenbuch - professor of marketing at Messiah University -
author of Honorable Influence - founder of Mindful Marketing

How far are you willing to go for fun? For some, it’s battling the traffic and crowds at busy summer beaches. For others, it’s climbing over ice and fighting to breathe on an expedition up Everest. Depending on one’s taste and budget, either one of these experiences can be a great time, but as extreme tourism increases, it’s time to ask, are extraordinary leisure activities worth their costs?

By now, most have heard of the Titan submersible’s ill-fated excursion to explore the sunken Titanic. When I first learned that OceanGate’s record-setting sub went missing enroute to the wreckage that lies 2.37 miles below the surface of the North Atlantic, I assumed it was a scientific expedition. Only after additional news reports did I realize that the five passengers passed away on a pleasure trip.

Regardless of the reason for the voyage, it’s tragic that these individuals lost their lives. It’s frightening to think of a sub imploding; hopefully, their passing was quick and painless. Still, the nature of the trip has caused some to question whether such a tour should have been offered, given its inherent risk.

Many people have jobs that require them to risk their lives each day such as: first responders, miners, loggers, construction workers, oil and gas workers, electrical power line installers and repairers. These brave individuals are typically well-trained and well-aware of the danger in their work, which they do to serve others, as well as for income. Leisure activities, in contrast, are by definition discretionary.

While everyone should have recreational time in which they can refresh their body and mind, there are many things people can do that require minimal cost and pose little or no risk, from reading, to walking in a park, to playing pickle ball. So, why does anyone need to do extremely dangerous activities like:

Free climbing – climbing a rock face with no ropes
Base jumping – parachuting from a fixed structure
Bull running – jogging with horned bovines
Big wave surfing – boarding on swells that reach 50 ft. or more

Of course, everyone is wired differently in terms of the recreational activities that bring them pleasure. While some like low-key, passive leisure (e.g., watching movies), others enjoy the physical exertion and competition that comes from playing a sport (e.g., tennis, football). Still others crave much more, like:

Experiencing an extreme adrenalin rush
Seeing or doing something that few others have seen or done
Testing one’s physical and mental limits

Before becoming vice president for finance and administration at Martin’s Famous Potato Rolls and Bread 12 years ago, Scott Heintzelman had a successful two-decade career in public accounting, including a long tenure as a CPA firm partner. For many people in his position and stage of life, the most leisure energy they’d expend would be on a round of golf. However, just before the age of 50, Heintzelman ran his first marathon, then soon turned his attention to triathlons. Over the past five years he's completed 13 Ironman races.

Heintzelman’s friends, family members, and others sometimes say he’s crazy to needlessly put himself through the months of grueling training followed by the body-breaking 140.6-mile competitions, which culminate with him crying upon crossing the finish line. So, why does he choose to recreate in such an extreme way?

Heintzelman says he likes testing himself mentally and physically and adds that enduring pain, delaying gratification, and overcoming negative thoughts have helped him become more disciplined, focused, and resilient – qualities that serve him well in other areas of life.

As the preceding suggests, participating in an Ironman certainly comes with physical costs. It also comes with some significant financial ones such as $1,000-$5,000 for a race-quality bike, $800 for travel expenses, $150 for a 6-month gym membership, and a $600-$800 race entry fee.

Still, these costs pale in comparison to an ultra-extreme sport like high-altitude mountain climbing, for which participants pay “around $100,000 or even more for the privilege to get to the world’s highest peaks.” In the process, there’s real risk of life altering injuries and death from falls, extreme cold, and oxygen deprivation, where above 8,000 meters, “there is so little oxygen that the body starts to die, minute by minute and cell by cell.”

This year, 12 climbers have died on Mount Everest, the world’s highest peak, and regrettably, five more who are missing and likely dead will make 2023 “the deadliest year ever.” One of the reasons for the increase in fatalities is overcrowding, as more inexperienced guides and climbers have made for a record number of climbing permits and caused traffic jams on already very challenging slopes. At times, queues of climbers enroute to the summit have looked like lines of vacationers waiting for a popular Disney World ride.

There are reportedly more than 50 companies that offer guided tours on Everest. Great supply is usually good for consumers, as added competition typically means more options and lower prices. Those things are true to some extent for Everest, but they’ve also meant a dangerous lowering of standards for climber competence and safety, to the point that certain companies will “take absolutely anyone up the mountain, regardless of experience, and cut corners on safety standards.”

One company that’s particularly notorious for taking human life lightly is Seven Summit Treks. Unlike other firms that usually limit their expeditions to 20 people, Seven Summit “is known to take as many as 100 climbers up the mountain — many of whom are unprepared for the altitude and physical exertion.”

The company also offers a VIP Everest Expedition “designed for those seeking to summit Mt. Everest in the utmost comfort and convenience” whether they are “an experienced climber or a first-timer for 8000er.” The expedition includes lessons at Everest basecamp on “ice wall climbing, ladder crossing, and other techniques that will be required for the ascent” – skills you’d think anyone who hopes to climb the world’s highest mountain would have already mastered.

This piece has gone from the depths of the sea with the recent OceanGate tourism tragedy to the heights of the earth with lives lost seeking to summit Everest. So, what do these two elevation extremes and all the options in between mean for those providing extreme leisure activities? Here are three potentially helpful considerations:

1) It’s hard to judge what leisure is too costly and risky: I would generally describe myself as cost-conscious and risk-adverse, which makes me want to point my finger at others spending hundreds of thousands of dollars and risking their lives to do things like deep ocean exploring and high-altitude climbing. Then I remember that I’ve done some leisure activities that others might consider too expensive and risky.

More than a decade ago, when my wife and I visited Kauai, we took advantage of what seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: to view the breath-taking island by helicopter. The nearly $200 we spent per ticket certainly could be considered excessive for the 50-minute ride. Likewise, flying inside canyons on the rugged Napali coast had risk. Then again, anyone who flies or drives anywhere for a vacation could be accused of incurring unnecessary cost and risk.

The point is, it’s difficult to draw a clear line between what is and isn’t excessive leisure. That’s not to say that there shouldn’t be a line or that anything should go but rather that it might be helpful to consider factors like cost relative to the individual’s income, if not per capita income, as well as the percentage of instances of severe injuries or death for those who engage in the activity.

2) Leisure interest can lead to scientific discovery: Sometimes people’s leisure leads to discoveries that benefit much larger groups of people. For instance, amateurs have documented unique animal behaviors and even discovered new species.

People pursing their recreational passions also have played significant roles in advancing fields like avionics and computing. Most recently, companies including SpaceX are leveraging what they’re learning from offering space tourism to create the potential for dramatically faster point-to-point travel on earth, such as a flight from New York City to Shanghai that might only take 40 minutes.

3) Consumers’ safety is critical: Ultimately, what matters most for companies marketing recreation of any kind, including extreme tourism, is safety. Of course, before people participate in dangerous activities, organizations must clearly communicate the risks. It’s fine to ask participants to sign waivers; however, those releases should never become substitutes for taking every reasonable step to ensure that individuals simply looking for a pleasurable leisure experience don’t return injured or dead.

It seems that the two extreme tourism companies mentioned above have both fallen short of this critical standard. Since OceanGate’s Titan submersible exploded, many have reported that there were serious safety concerns surrounding the structural integrity of the deep-diving craft. Similarly, beyond Seven Summits Treks’ questionable onboarding practices described above, the firm’s owner resists rules for who should or shouldn’t enter into Everest’s death zone; instead, he recommends, “If [people] have enough energy, they can go.”

As Baby Boomers and Gen Xs look for a last hurrah and experience-driven Gen Ys and Zs gain disposable income, it’s likely that demand for extreme tourism will continue to increase. Companies that want to capitalize on this trend should ensure that the benefits they provide to clients are proportionate to the costs they incur. In addition, others outside the exchange shouldn't be asked to bear costs (e.g., environmental degradation, rescue costs) without receiving benefits.

Above all, organizations must do everything possible to ensure their clients’ safety. In an often-unpredictable natural world complicated by periodic human error, safety can seldom be guaranteed. However, at 3,800 meters below sea level or 29,000 meters above it, companies should have air-tight models for returning their clients safely; otherwise, they’re liable for “Single-Minded Marketing.”

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Why Did the PGA Stop Keeping Score with LIV?

6/20/2023

5 Comments

by David Hagenbuch - professor of marketing at Messiah University -
author of Honorable Influence - founder of Mindful Marketing

“If you can’t beat them join them.” This old adage, suggesting that adversaries become allies, has been used to describe everything from Vichy France aligning with Nazi Germany to Apollo Creed training Rocky Balboa. Now a very surprising real-life sports pairing has made ethics appear expendable or at least raised the question: Is it okay to have a moral change of mind?

The Professional Golfers’ Association’s (PGA) decision to merge with LIV Golf was a move that virtually no one expected. Even professional golfers and analysts who cover the game were shocked by the news. The PGA’s sudden change of heart, which went from viewing LIV as a bitter rival to a bedfellow also represented for many an epic moral capitulation.

Over the past year, the PGA and LIV have been “at war.” The PGA had threatened to suspend golfers who defected to LIV and even ban them for life. Why such acrimony? Of course, no organization wants a new competitor, especially one that steals its product (golfers) and commandeers its place (golf venues).

However, the PGA’s disdain for LIV was rooted in more than competition-fueled conflict. Many in the veteran golf association, as well as others, took issue with LIV’s funding source – the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia, the nation of origin for 15 of the 19 hijackers involved in the 9/11 attacks and a country known for human right abuses.

In an interview just a month ago, the PGA’s CEO, Seth Waugh, was heard “trashing” LIV Golf ahead of the PGA Championship. How is such a seemingly irreconcilable relationship so suddenly repaired? One ESPN piece, “How the shocking PGA Tour-LIV Golf deal went down” details the events leading up to the proposed merger and its players, while another describes how the unification, which also includes the DP World Tour (Europe), might solidify the sport long-term.

This Mindful Marketing article doesn’t pretend to know what’s best for the future of professional golf; rather, it aims to ask a more general philosophical question: Was it okay for the PGA to have a moral change of mind?

Of course, it’s not organizations but the individuals that manage them who make decisions, including ethical ones. Most of us have experienced that our initial inclinations are not always optimal. As evidence, we’ve all mistakes and often realized later the option we should have selected.

Imperfect decision-making is a thread that has run continually through human history and often involved ethics. For instance, decisions in favor of racial segregation in the U.S. in the 19th- and 20th century are ones that most Americans now reject, as are the choices that kept women from voting until 1920.

Realizing the error of one’s way and self-correcting a moral stance is a good thing. However, it’s also important to help others understand the reason for the reversal. Intelligent, inquiring people want to know not just that a judgment that was A is now B but why it’s changed That’s where moral reasoning helps.

In a moral argument, a person first identifies a moral standard then suggests one or more alleged facts, which lead to a conclusion, or moral judgment. A month ago, it seemed that many PGA supporters/LIV detractors morally reasoned along the lines of the following:

Human rights should be upheld. (moral standard)
Saudi Arabia has not upheld certain human rights. (alleged fact 1)
LIV Golf’s funding come from the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia. (alleged fact 2)
LIV Golf’s funding source taints the league. (alleged fact 3)
It’s wrong for professional golfers to play for LIV. (moral judgment)

Then, without notice, the PGA reversed course, announcing its merger with LIV and thereby introducing a new moral judgement: It’s fine for professional golfers to play for LIV.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with having a moral change of heart, especially if it’s the result of ethical enlightenment. However, others deserve to know what changed the moral judgment, which is where the PGA fell short of the cup.

A year ago, PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan was invoking the 9/11 terrorist attacks as a main reason to reject LIV. Now, he will reportedly serve as CEO of the newly created company.

Monahan and the PGA have offered little evidence that their change of heart had anything to do with recognition of either a more compelling moral standard or more salient alleged facts such as, ‘Saudi Arabia’s record on human rights is improving’ or ‘Where money comes from doesn’t matter as much as what’s done with it.’

Moreover, it appears that the PGA has made a wholesale change in its moral decision-making from principle-based ethics, or nonconsequentialism, to outcome-based ethics, or consequentialism. Evidence of this philosophical shift can be seen in recent statements from the PGA and Monahan that focus not on upholding specific moral principles but on prioritizing outcomes for the game of golf, for instance:

“We are pleased to move forward, in step with LIV and PIF’s world-class investing experience, and I applaud PIF Governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan for his vision and collaborative and forward-thinking approach that is not just a solution to the rift in our game, but also a commitment to taking it to new heights. This will engender a new era in global golf, for the better.”

Understandably, given what’s transpired, this explanation has failed to reach the green for many of the tour’s most important stakeholders. Many top professional golfers, have felt blindsided by the decision and left to wonder what inspired it. Rory McIlroy, the third ranked golfer in the world, said he was surprised by news of the merger, he felt like a “sacrificial lamb,” and he hated LIV and hoped it would go away.

Similarly, hall of fame golfer Tom Watson sent a letter to Monahan questioning the merger Watson also acknowledged that his skepticism about the new structure has been “compounded by the hypocrisy in disregarding the moral issue.”

If the merger goes through, professional golf, with its strong new financial backing and consolidation will likely thrive. However, the PGA’s pivot has left a moral divot that will not be easily replaced.

It’s the prerogative of any person and professional sports association, to have a moral change of heart. However, when such happens, it’s also important to say why. By not explaining how it so quickly arrived at a very different moral judgment about LIV, the PGA hit the ball into a bunker of “Single-Minded Marketing.”

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The Pros and Cons of Artificial Influencers

5/7/2023

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by David Hagenbuch - professor of marketing at Messiah University -
author of Honorable Influence - founder of Mindful Marketing

Who would you ask for an important restaurant recommendation? You might turn to someone who knows the local area well, eats out frequently, or has discerning taste. What about asking someone who’s never been to a restaurant or ever eaten food? That seems like a silly suggestion, but with companies increasingly offering advice through artificial endorsers, the notion of consulting a ‘tech expert’ has taken on a whole new meaning.

I recently received an email from OpenTable in which the well-known reservation app announced an innovative partnership with the suddenly famous AI bot ChatGPT:

“We’re collaborating with the internet’s favorite chatbot to make finding the perfect table as easy as texting your best friend. Soon you can ask ChatGPT for restaurant recommendations for the perfect family brunch spot, a lively rooftop for a big group, or a romantic table for 2, and you’ll received recommendations with a direct link to book in seconds.”

It’s an intriguing proposition – asking a chatbot that doesn’t have tastebuds or emotions, let alone a significant other, to suggest a restaurant for a romantic dinner.

Virtual beings aren’t just recommending what to eat; they’re also suggesting what to wear. The 170-year-old jeans maker Levi’s recently grabbed headlines when it announced plans to increase diversity in its advertising by employing AI clothing models.

But wait, there’s more! Marketing technology guru Shelly Palmer has compiled a list of companies using virtual influencers to build their brands, which includes many notables such as Alibaba, IKEA, League of Legends, Lux Shampoo, Pacsun, and Puma. As the science and acceptance of AI continues to advance, all signs point to a baby boom of virtual brand endorsers.

Over the past few months, millions of people have turned to ChatGPT and some similar AI bots for answers, often to factual questions about:

general knowledge and information, such as definitions, historical events, and scientific facts
technology, such as how to use a particular software or troubleshoot a technical problem
health and medicine, such as symptoms, treatments, and side effects of various conditions
current events, such as news updates and breaking news

For those kinds of objective answers, it certainly makes sense to leverage machine learning, which can scour “a colossally large repository of text” and very quickly and adeptly “parse queries and produce fully-fleshed out answers and results based on most of the world's digitally-accessible text-based information.”

There’s a difference, though, between returning a list of “all fine-dining restaurants in Denver” and recommending a few that seem like the best fit for the particular diner’s occasion, palate, price range, and other personal preferences.

Companies wouldn’t use AI-powered artificial endorsers if they didn’t have advantages, but as this piece has already suggested, they also have disadvantages. Here’s what this human marketer sees as the pros and cons of virtual spokespeople.

Pro 1 – Affordability: Firms don’t have to pay artificial influencers, but they do need to pay for 3-D modeling which can be about $75,000 for a six-month contract. That’s not cheap but it is cost-effective compared to the deals demanded by A-list celebrities like Taylor Swift ($26 million from Diet Coke) and David Beckham ($160 million lifetime from Adidas).

Con 1 – Apathy: Jobs for humans are often an issue in conversations about AI. Virtual spokespeople don’t care that they might be replacing people. The companies that make and use the avatars may or may not feel conflicted, but at least some humans are needed to do the 3-D modeling and help manage the virtual endorsers.

Pro 2 – Adaptability: Firms can program an artificial endorser to do and say anything they want, as well as look anyway they want. These spokesbots will always deliver their lines perfectly, they’ll never cause PR headaches because of missteps in their social lives, and they’ll always maintain the ‘ideal’ weight, hair color, and skin tone.

Con 2 – Inauthenticity: Because they’re nonautonomous beings that speak others’ words, virtual endorsers can’t be truly authentic. One might argue that human spokespeople also parrot what they’re told to say , but at least they have a conscience and can decide, ‘The money is very attractive, but I can’t support this company/product.’

Pro 3 – Omniscience: As suggested above, AI-powered applications can scan and assimilate incredible amounts of information. Although they can’t literally know everything, and they sometimes make mistakes, their knowledge and accuracy will keep getting better and exceedingly surpass that of humans.

Con 3 – Inexperience: Even as virtual endorsers may have unparalleled knowledge, they have no real experience. As mentioned above, ChatGPT can’t eat food or wear jeans, so how can it really recommend restaurants or clothing?

Pro 4 – Disclosure: When we see ads with endorsers, whether they’re real people or digital beings, we instinctively know that they’re sharing a perspective that’s at least somewhat biased toward the advertised product. In some ways, the presence of virtual beings, which are still relatively uncommon, makes it even clearer that the communication is not impartial.

Con 4 – Deception: Although leading people to believe that their endorsement is unbiased is a possible problem for both human and animated beings, artificial endorsers hold greater potential to mislead, to the extent that their very life-like looks and mannerism make them seem real. This realism ties back to the issue of inauthenticity (Con 2) and represents the greatest potential ethical issue for spokesbots.

As described above, their lack of volition means artificial endorsers can never really say what’s on their mind, or be totally truthful. When people know a spokesperson isn’t human, they can account for that inauthenticity by raising their perceptual defenses and being more leery of what’s said. However, if consumers believe a spokesbot is a real person, that added skepticism will never arise.

Right now, most artificial endorsers still appear fake, although some, like Puma’s Maya look and act incredibly real. In fact, many have wondered if she is human, and some have even expressed a romantic interest in her.

As time goes on and technology advances, spokesbots will become more and more indistinguishable from real people. Organizations that employ artificial endorsers should let the public know that their digital creations aren’t real through some kind of disclaimer (e.g., “Maya is a virtual person”). Otherwise, consumers may give the bots’ communication more credence than it deserves since they’re not real humans who have genuinely judged companies’/products’ merits and made deliberate decisions that they are worthy of endorsement.

Over millennia of buying and selling products, people have known that it’s difficult for sellers to be truly objective about their wares, but buyers also know that spokespeople must make a conscious choice to endorse. Organizations that attempt to sidestep those consumer perceptions by passing off their spokesbots as real, autonomous people are endorsing “Single-Minded Marketing.”

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