The Colibrily Crew - Ethical marketing policy

ETHICAL MARKETING, ADVERTISEMENT, OR CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT COMMITMENTS TO HONESTY IN MARKETING

As ethical marketers, we commit to absolute honesty, transparency, and a community-first approach in our marketing for our own campaigns, customers’ campaigns, and partner-driven projects.

ONGOING PROJECT-BASED REFLECTIONS

To ensure honesty in marketing, The Colibrily Crew will consider the ethics of our strategies and your tactics with every project.

Examples:

Are we clearly communicating our product or service’s value without exaggerating or misleading our key audiences?

• Are we serving our customers and clients equally without compromising our integrity?
• Are we failing the values of our organization by not continually reviewing our marketing strategies?
• Are we accurately quoting our customers, partners, and team when we share reviews or testimonials?
• Is our use of data and examples honest and accurate when promoting our features, benefits, or the impact of our products and services?

COMMITMENT TO REJECTING IMPACT WASHING

Impact washing is similar to greenwashing. It happens when a business exaggerates its positive impact to gain a marketing advantage or uses “feel good” marketing to cover up or distract from negative outcomes that its core business model is having in other areas—socially or environmentally.

Examples:

We commit to being fully honest and transparent about our work’s social and environmental impacts.

• We will do our due diligence homework when representing clients’ claims, especially in the health and wellness industry.
• We will avoid using “feel good” marketing to promote or sell client products or our own organization.

COMMITMENT TO CULTURAL SENSITIVITY IN CAMPAIGN CREATIVE

Many marketing campaigns and messages have the potential to be insensitive. Avoiding such campaigns requires self-awareness and including others in the creative process.

Examples:

We reject using any creative campaigns that are culturally insensitive.

• All marketing campaigns will follow the best practices of inclusivity and diversity.
• Avoiding any savior complex campaigns.

COMMITMENT TO PERMISSION-BASED EMAIL MARKETING

“Permission-based marketing is anticipated, personal, and relevant.” — Seth Godin.

The term permission marketing, originated by marketing thought leader Seth Godin in his 1999 book of the same name, describes marketing in which the recipient provides permission to send them marketing materials. Another way to describe this is that they have opted to receive marketing messages.

We pledge to focus our email marketing on the following:

Creating value within any free content (including videos, blogs, online resources, online classes, social media posts, etc.),

• Being GDPR compliant
• Maintaining the trust of email lists by offering value and restricting messaging to content related to the original opt-in intent.
• Being CCPA compliant with our clients.

COMMITMENT TO ETHICAL DIGITAL ADVERTISING

All advertising content falls somewhere on the honesty spectrum, from manipulative and dishonest to accurate, ethical, and honest.

The Colibrily Crew is committed to ensuring the accuracy and ethics of the content we promote through digital advertising.

Our Approach to Ethical Advertising Includes the following considerations:

False advertising: This one speaks for itself. If an advertisement makes untrue claims about a product or service or misrepresents what is on offer, it is false advertising, an unethical marketing tactic.

• Issues with Advertorial Advertising: It is essential that an online user can tell what paid advertising is vs. editorial content. Advertorial content looks like unbiased editorial/earned media but is paid for to advertise. This type of content can occur in written articles, social media posts, reviews, or videos. Influencer marketing often relies on the process of well-connected social influencers promoting products or services to their audiences, often through content that would be considered advertorial if the influencer is not transparent that the content is a paid promotion. While some may see advertorial content as an ethical gray area, it is increasingly becoming clear that misleading users into believing that a brand mention is based on editorial merit alone, when in fact the brand paid for the placement, is an unethical marketing tactic by both the publisher and brand buying the paid content.
• Pop-ups, pop-unders, and modal windows: Websites can deploy various pop-up-style promotions.
• Pop-ups or pop-unders (that create new tabs or windows behind the main browser window) are now widely considered unethical marketing tactics. They often offer misleading statistics about how many people actually see their content, and few users engage with this type of content.
• A modal window is a term for using similar techniques within your website, where the pop-up is part of your web page. Modal windows are often used for contact forms, email signups, and other strategies. When correctly implemented, modal windows can be helpful for the user and very effective for marketing. However, when overused, they can become annoying and degrade the user experience of your website.

COMMITMENT TO ETHICAL SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

We Practice and Encourage the Following Best Practices for White Hat SEO and Content Marketing:

Link building: Create valuable content that people will want to link to

• Use PR and aligned partnerships to build links
• Proper use of redirects to help users find the right content
• Creating helpful, well-branded 404 pages with useful navigation
• Put the user first, focus on value, and create content that aligns with our mission

Black Hat SEO: Tactics that We Avoid and Discourage

• Purchasing links: Paying for links from other websites. Links should be built organically, based on merit and real relationships and partnerships.
• Automated link building: Using software or online bots to build links.
• Hidden content and links: Intentionally hiding content or links so that only the search engines can see them.
• Stolen or plagiarised content generation: Using content scraping technology or direct content theft to generate high volumes of content to build your site’s size and perceived authority.
• Keyword stuffing or over-optimization: There is a fine line between manually optimizing content for SEO best practices (white hat on-page optimization) and over-optimization, which can also be called keyword stuffing. Learning where this line is takes experience and a deep understanding of the latest algorithms. As the algorithm changes, the line may shift over time.
• Misdirection or Unethical redirects: Cloaking and doorway pages. Black hat SEO uses a variety of shady redirection schemes. These typically involve redirecting people away from long-form content into pages more focused on conversions/sales, affiliate marketing, or paid advertising. In these cases, the content that appealed to the search engine algorithm, which resulted in a high organic ranking, differs from what the user sees after clicking the link.

COMMITMENT TO THE ETHICAL USE OF GENERATIVE AI

We recognize the growing role of generative AI in digital marketing, including content creation, and acknowledge that Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained using copyrighted material without explicit consent. However, we are committed to using this technology responsibly and ethically.

Read more about our Ethical AI Principles.

Our Approach to Using Generative AI Ethically Includes the following considerations:

Transparency: Rest assured that no content we produce for clients is completely AI-generated. We believe in combining technological innovation with human creativity.

• Accuracy: Our team will carefully review and edit AI-generated content to ensure accuracy and relevance.
• Privacy: We will prioritize the privacy of individuals and avoid using AI to collect or analyze data without explicit consent.
• Bias: We will continuously monitor and mitigate any biases in AI-generated content to promote fairness and inclusivity.
• Accountability: We will remain accountable for the outputs of our AI systems and ensure they align with our ethical standards and values.
• Education: We will continue our team’s training as this technology and its best practices evolve.

COMMITMENT TO UPDATE THESE PRACTICES AS THE INDUSTRY EVOLVES

We expect ethical marketing practices to continue to evolve along with the technologies marketers use to discover, reach, and engage audiences. The line that separates ethical from unethical marketing practices can shift rapidly as major online platforms such as Google, Facebook, and other search and social applications roll out updates and new options for data-driven targeting. We will continue to monitor the state of the field across different marketing channels and tactics and update our practices accordingly.

QUESTIONS AND FEEDBACK

We always strive to do the right thing for our clients, and adhering to these ethical practices is part of that work. If you have questions or feedback to share that will help us do better, we encourage you to reach out and let us know.

Please contact us using our website contact form for any of the following:

To request more information

• To provide feedback
• To access, edit, or delete personal information we may have about you
• To register a complaint