As I write this, the weather is a lot better than it was since I wrote my first post back in mid-February. So why not take a gander at some literature about digital advertising ethics in the great indoors?

Just as a reminder, the question that we’re posing is “is it really so bad for digital advertisers to have our data since it’s curated to our interests?”

Here are the conclusions we can draw based on a general literature review!

Conclusion #1: Advertising in general has always been ethically questionable

With its lack of regulation, internet advertising is like Times Square 24/7 😵‍💫
Photo by Andrae Ricketts on Unsplash

In an article for the Journal of Promotion Management, Faruk Tanyel, Elnora W. Stuart and Jan Griffin note that consumers have always had negative perceptions of advertising.

In particular, internet advertising has been compared to gigantic billboards on highways, and with no regulation for how ads can be placed and displayed (note that governments can regulate the content),1 while consumers feel bombarded by these ads, advertisers feel motivated to create ads that are catchy and acceptable by their audiences.

Millennials, as the cohort who has lived through the most digital advertising in their lifetimes (internet advertising began in 1994), hold particular negative views on digital advertising, since they have also lived in the heyday of television advertising in their childhoods, then a time of cascading internet advertising as they enter into adulthood. Interestingly, they also are the cohort the most tolerant towards internet advertising, accepting it as part of their realities of being digital citizens.2

It’s this laissez-faire attitude that advertisers are able to penetrate and exploit by creating avenues for more addictive content and campaigns that approach the line of being ethically questionable, since there is no other alternative that has such incredible accuracy (and in most cases, also with precision) than advertising.

Conclusion #2: Digital advertising is incredibly effective

Many young people are getting nutrition advice (or maybe lack thereof) from their favourite influencers – which affect their dietary choices.
Photo by CDC on Unsplash

I bring up the point on accuracy again here. Charlene D. Elliott and Emily Truman from the University of Calgary note that food advertising on digital platforms amongst teenagers in Canada is incredibly accurate.

From being able to target specific genders of teenagers depending on what their platform of preference is, exploiting trends or using their favourite influencers to promote products from Starbucks, Skip the Dishes or Circle K, there have been studies that suggest that this relationship between teenagers and food advertising that food intake in this cohort increases along with these advertising campaigns.3

The federal government has identified a dramatic increase in childhood and youth obesity in the last 30 years. With internet advertising starting 31 years ago, I don’t suggest an explicit correlation between internet advertising and increased childhood obesity, but I also don’t believe that it is out of the question to suggest that this effectively accurate advertising is going to bring the number down anytime soon.4

Conclusion #3: Everyone has ethical responsibilities when it comes to digital advertising

Being in an election cycle means that we’ll be getting lots of conflicting information through digital platforms over the next two weeks. Just like with all advertising, misleading digital advertising has its consequences too.

Other countries have strict guidelines that regulate online advertising that originates from their country. The United Kingdom’s Advertising Standards Authority takes responsibility for policing ads to ensure their accuracy:

For the most part in Canada, advertising, including and especially those online, is an unregulated industry, meaning that neither the government nor advertisers have oversight over claims made in advertising. It’s what makes ads like this one I saw on Facebook this morning possible:

When I clicked on this ad (knowing it was probably fake, considering the incredibly partisan headline allegedly from the CBC and the poor photoshop job), the page looked like this:

This is a pretty convincing ad. If I wasn’t so vigilant, I would have thought it was actually the CBC, but take a look at the URL at the top of my screenshot… that doesn’t seem like a CBC URL. In fact, this entire page is an ad for a shady financial trading platform.

Yet despite that, no one except the consumer is responsible for this. Meta is complicit in allowing this ad to be published, this trading platform is equally unethical in their dealing of impersonating a reputable source.

In 2025, it might be hard to impose a sense of responsibility on corporations, but research in the area of digital marketing basically begs for governments and the advertising industry to create any sort of regulation and restore balance from the consumer to sift through what is true and what is not in an ad to creating honest, equitable claims that actually make advertising more tolerable.5

  1. Faruk Tanyel, Elnora W. Stuart & Jan Griffin, “Have “Millennials” Embraced Digital Advertising as They Have Embraced Digital Media?,” Journal of Promotion Management 19, no. 5 (2013): 652-673, https://doi.org/10.1080/10496491.2013.829161. ↩︎
  2. Ibid. ↩︎
  3. Charlene D Elliott and Emily Truman, “Food marketing on digital platforms: what do teens see?,” Public Health Nutrition 27, no. 48 (2024): 1-9, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1368980024000235. ↩︎
  4. Government of Canada, “Childhood obesity,” accessed April 14, 2025, https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/childhood-obesity/childhood-obesity.html. ↩︎
  5. Sonia Dickinson-Delaporte, Kathleen Mortimer, Gayle Kerr, David S Waller, Alice Kendrick, “Power and responsibility: Advertising self-regulation and consumer protection in a digital world,” Journal of Consumer Affairs 54, no. 2 (2020): 675-699, https://doi.org/10.1111/joca.12295. ↩︎