As technology continues to develop, marketers will be faced with more and more ethical dilemmas. These dilemmas can range from having lengthy disclaimers at the bottom of their ads to paying off bloggers and reviewers to give their good or service a positive review. As highlighted in the short video “Marketing Ethics Disclaimers”, while disclaimers (the small writing sometimes seen at the bottom of the page, screen ect..) may be legal they are essentially marketers way of ‘crossing their fingers’ to whatever is said and adding additional pieces of information to an advertisement in a discrete way. It is an ethical decision on the part of both the marketers and the companies to plainly disclose all relevant information that could affect a consumer’s decision and not keep it in a small, blurry paragraph. While disclaimers can be visually seen (usually with the assistance of a magnified glass) paid reviews are not always as easily identified. A recent BizReport article, citing estimates from Gartner Research, states that ‘by 2014 10-15% of all reviews will have been paid for’. That number may be staggering, but bodies like the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) work to ensure that all reviews that are paid for state so in some way or form ― an example being #paid on Twitter would suffice. However, this leaves a great area for under the table payments to be made from marketers to reviewers to positively promote their good or service and have them not disclose that they had received payment. This could result in not only an ethical dilemma on the parts of both the reviewers and the marketers, but not disclosing payment would be put under the category of ‘deceptive advertising’ by the FTC.

 – Sean Bell