Chapter 1. Evaluating Communication Ethics: Marketing for a Better Band

You have an internship at a marketing company, and one of your tasks is to help promote a local band called Spikefish. You love this assignment because you are a fan of the band and hope to help them become more successful. You begin by looking at Spikefish’s Facebook and Instagram profiles to see how they are branding themselves: What kinds of photos, messages, and flyers do they post about their music and their gigs? But your boss tells you to focus first on the followers rather than the band. She tells you that she can “mine” the personal data of every Spikefish follower on social media, including what other artists they follow, what other websites they visit, their likes, entertainment favorites, political opinions, hobbies, and shopping history. She says that this will open the door to potential new followers who have similar interests (and whose personal data she can also obtain). Spikefish can also use this information to “rebrand” themselves (change their clothes and hair, adapt their music, etc.) not only to better suit their current followers, but to broaden their appeal to a wider audience based on the data.

You really want Spikefish to be successful, but you feel like it is sneaky and manipulative to use people’s personal information without their knowledge to target them directly with tailored advertising on their social media feeds. But you can also see that this could be good for the consumers because the advertising would reach the very people who would actually like to know about this band. So you are torn. You are also troubled about the band potentially changing their image and their music just to fit the audience data — isn’t that not being “true” to themselves as artists?