Marketing Ethics and AI: Building Trust in an AI-Driven World

As 2026 settles in, I don’t need to describe to anyone the huge presence AI has in our lives. Both personal and professional. There are very many opinions of how welcome that is, I think most of us are still working that out, but we can’t deny that it already has some amazing benefits in the Marketing world. If used well, it can be great to prompt ideas when a blank sheet of paper is staring you in the face, or give initial drafts (yes, just initial drafts) of content or copy, which you can nuance, or build on, to your heart’s content.

As well as GenAI we also have new improved AI/ML techniques to better handle far greater volumes of data – be that yours or 3rd party – gaining an even better understanding of audiences. Many companies are combining these capabilities to place a window on research data, allowing them to have conversations with their very own bespoke focus groups.

And to top it off, using all of this fabulous intelligence & content you can combine it with the AI functions within our Martech tools, which helps us get our timing right, test different channels, identify next best actions – measuring and altering as we go, all in real time.

Amazing.

However, just because we’re all excited, it doesn’t mean the consumer feels the same way. There is still a fair degree of mistrust with consumers disliking the lack of certainty of who is talking to them – a human or a machine. The airspace that deepfakes, misinformation and the power of “The Algorithm” all feed that mistrust. Brands still have personalities, but in some cases they can be eroded if we handover too much freedom to (apologies for the repetition) “The Algorithm”.

Our marketing community are by no means trying to mislead consumers, but it is fair to say that we need checks and balances to ensure that nothing is going awry with our data and the AI processes we place upon it. As well as our legal obligations we have some ethical ones – not to mislead, discriminate, unwittingly prolong biases, exclude certain audience, or use outdated stereotypical typecasting. Not just to be nice. But because our consumers will demand it as they become more overwhelmed with trying to work out their place in this AI world; we will need to insert that personality back into our brands, and no one likes someone they can’t trust.

Join us at the DMA Annual Conference to talk through some of those ethical questions, working through examples of unintended consequences of putting too much power in the hands of the machine at our 'How Badly Could This Go? A Marketing Ethics Simulation' session.