In 2017 Facebook hired 8,500 people to manually review content that had been rejected for publication by Facebook’s algorithms. Facebook also changed its algorithms in its News Feed to show users fewer news items and more personal items. Facebook made these changes because Facebook users, critics in the media, and critics in the government were concerned about fake news, and Facebook wanted to regain the trust of users, critics, and politicians. Facebook’s attempts to address the problem of fake news without government passing restrictive regulations was an example of an important medium where people get a large portion of their news self‐regulating, of putting the needs of consumers first, before its own need for profits.
2. Responsibility to their conscience
All salespeople are responsible to themselves for doing what they believe is good or bad, right or wrong, and is based on their own conscience or moral standards. John Wooden, the legendary UCLA basketball coach, said that there is no pillow as soft as a clear conscience. Purposely acting unethically will erode a salesperson’s self‐esteem. By acting ethically, salespeople increase their self‐esteem, self‐image, and self‐confidence and do the same for their company. By acting ethically, salespeople develop a long‐term perspective, which benefits their mental health and their company as well as the customers and consumers.
Unfortunately, some salespeople and sales organizations are more motivated by greed, in making money or “getting the stock price up,” than in building a highly respected personal or company reputation. Such greed inevitably produces cheating, which is a cancer that erodes a person’s or a company’s reputation and eventually will kill the company. Those who conduct business unethically know they are doing so, but they continue doing the wrong thing because they believe they will not get caught. However, they are playing an ethical lottery in which the odds of being discovered are high, as we saw with Enron and Harvey Weinstein. Practicing ethical behavior every business day is the only sure way of maintaining a reputation, and self‐esteem grows as the result.
3. Responsibility to customers
Customers (advertisers) do not buy from or partner with media companies and salespeople they do not trust. Thus, media salespeople should concentrate on building trust and managing relationships for the long term, not merely selling for a one‐shot deal. Salespeople must underpromise and overdeliver.
Customer‐oriented rules for media salespeople – the Don’ts
Don’t lie to advertisers.
Don’t sell anything that customers do not truly need.
Don’t allow clients to feel like they lost in a negotiation (“Leave something on the table.”)12
Don’t be unfair to advertisers.
Don’t sell something customers cannot afford.
Don’t use bait‐and‐switch tactics (selling something that they know is not available just to get the money in the door).
Don’t recommend or accept advertising that is in bad taste or that will harm a client’s image.
Don’t accept false or misleading advertising.
Don’t give kickbacks (a euphemism for bribes) to customers. Kickbacks often come in the form of unauthorized rebates or other cash payments given by salespeople from their own pockets. Kickbacks are illegal, and there are serious consequences to violating the law, including fines and imprisonment.
Rules for media salespeople – the Dos
Do represent your clients. Media salespeople’s responsibility is to publish the best possible advertising for their clients and to try to get the clients the best, fairest deal they are entitled to according to a medium’s official pricing and positioning policies. Salespeople should be their client’s advocates inside their organizations.
Do keep privileged information confidential. Salespeople must keep privileged information to themselves, including details about advertisers’ strategy, budgets, creative plans, special sales, and media plans until the campaign has broken and the information is readily available from outside sources. When a client or advertising agency requests competitive information, salespeople should not give it out before the campaign starts. If salespeople have done their selling job properly, they have sold themselves as solutions providers, which implies a privileged relationship, such as that between a doctor and patient. Customers have a right to assume that salespeople are experts whose recommendations are given with their customers’ best interests in mind.
Underpromise. It is salespeople’s responsibility not to promise what advertising by itself cannot deliver. The media can deliver exposure to an audience. But the media cannot be certain of generating sales results, so it should not promise results to advertisers. Rather, salespeople should promise only what they can deliver. The rule to remember is “underpromise and overdeliver.”
4. Responsibility to the community
The word community has many meanings, but in this context, it is limited to four: (1) the global community, (2) the general business community, (3) an industry community, and (4) a local community.
The global community. Each corporation and individual ultimately has a responsibility to the world community. We owe it to society to act in a way that provides the greatest good for the greatest number of people, that enhances the environment, that improves the human experience and condition, and that, in the words of the Hippocratic oath, does no harm. To answer questions about our social responsibility, we should always ask ourselves the question, “Suppose everybody did this?”13
The business community. As members of the free‐market business community salespeople must behave responsibly so that investors, regulators, and the general public have faith in our capitalistic system. All companies have, or should have, published rules, codes, or standards that prohibit unethical behavior such as selling stock based on inside knowledge, shredding documents or deleting computer files to avoid prosecution, cooking the books to inflate revenue, and avoiding sexual harassment. In business, as well as in society, salespeople must ask: “Suppose everybody did this? Would the regulators, investors, and the public maintain their faith in the free‐market system and in business?”
An industry community. The media have a special responsibility to the public because in many cases the media deliver the news to Americans. The public also forms many of their social values, beliefs, attitudes, and opinions from the digital, social, electronic, and print media. This enormous power makes it more imperative that the media wield that power responsibly. As a country, we altered our aggregate opinions about racial prejudice, about the war in Iraq, and about women’s rights while we watched images of these issues mesmerize, indoctrinate, and change us. The advertising messages between these images guaranteed the freedom of the press that bigots, the government, and non‐egalitarian people might not want us to have. If any one of these groups had controlled the media, we might not have been exposed to these issues and the truth would not have worked its torturous way into our collective consciousness. Therefore, media companies and their salespeople have the responsibility of keeping the media and the press free by fueling it with the advertising revenue it needs to remain so. Without a free, advertising‐ or subscriber‐supported media, there cannot be a free exchange of ideas. This exchange of ideas leads to an informed electorate, the foundation of our democracy. As a salesperson, you might say, “The high‐minded notion of protecting democracy is fine if you’re selling “60 Minutes” or CNN or