• by Wendy Davis , Joe Mandese , 9 hours ago

The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) is launching a new ethics course that will address topics such as artificial intelligence, marketing claims, privacy, and inclusive marketing.

The 90-minute online program, led by Senny Boone, senior vice president of the ANA Center for Ethical Marketing & Nonprofit Federation and Lisa Brown Shosteck, consulting director of the center, will be available Sept. 7.

The organization's move comes around two years after it unveiled ethical guidelines with regard to topics such as AI in marketing, as well as best practices regarding privacy, diversity and advertising to children.

The current guidelines include recommendations on issues that the advertising industry has addressed for years such as consumer privacy, as well as on emerging issues, such as the use of automated systems in advertising.

For instance, the privacy section says consumers' opt-out requests "should be addressed as effectively and efficiently as possible with promptness and to meet the consumers’ reasonable expectations and applicable laws."

The section on artificial intelligence encourages marketers to guard against the use of biased data.

"The outputs of automated systems may become biased if they arise from biased data input or are trained on biased data, or bias may arise due to a biased originating source with no human corrective action taken," the guidelines state. "Having a diverse development team can help protect against this potential bias."

The new course will be free for the group's "client-side marketer" members and platinum-tier members, and will cost $49 for gold members, $79 for silver members and $99 for non-members.

The organization also plans a free Sept. 24 "town hall" dedicated to the topic of ethical marketing.

The ANA's ethics' initiatives follows the formation of the Institute for Advertising Ethics more than six years ago. The IAE has recently expanded from its roots in education and professional certification into more proactive forms of ad industry self-regulation.