10 Questions With Vanessa Camones (S1, Ep11)
The founder of marketing firm AnyContext explains why ethics should be a part of every company’s product roadmap and story.
Editor’s note: This was originally published on LinkedIn.
Technology was once praised for being innovative, helping to change how we do work, get around more conveniently, and communicated with one another. It helped to make the world a much smaller and more connected place — so what happened to make us question this reality?
Over the past couple of years, scandals about technology’s use in destroying our democracy, dividing us, and erosion of our privacy have stemmed its progress. Today, we’re examining whether companies like Facebook and Google have amassed too much influence and should be broken up, if technology like artificial intelligence and facial recognition should be regulated, and expressing outrage over misbehavior and unfair treatment in the workplace.
Somewhere in all this progress, we’ve forgotten about ethics, something that plays a critical part in every aspect of a company’s being. This is one of Vanessa Camones’ missions: to remind leaders about the importance of ethics in technology. As the chief executive of marketing and communication firm AnyContext, she has spent years helping companies craft messaging and campaigns to promote goods and services. She recently joined BoardSeatMeet, an advocacy group dedicated to improving women representation in the board room, and launched a program called LevelEleven to teach leaders how to behave in a responsible manner.
In this week’s “10 Questions”, I asked Vanessa about her ethics push and what Silicon Valley as a whole can do better to regain the public’s trust.
This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
How did you get involved in technology?
I got involved in technology when I first came to the states and my dad used to take me on campus while he was getting his masters in engineering/computer science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). I use to sit and look through the glass while reading and doing homework at these massive IBM machines that I later would come to understand to be computers. I was six years old. I’ve been completely fascinated with technology since then and by the time I was 9 I had learned DOS commands on my dad’s “email” terminal at home. We had moved to California to the place where Silicon Valley was founded — Santa Clara. And thus began my continued love affair with tech.
What makes you qualified to talk about ethics and technology?
It’s what I studied and also part of the mission of the college I attended — Santa Clara University. While I was there getting a major in English and Mass Communications we had to take classes based on ethics and technology. During the time I was there, the University opened up the Markulla Center for Applied Ethics, which as the impetus for our new ethics based practice — leveleleven. It’s the core of what my first agency — theMIX agency (founded in 2007) applied in all client work that we did — particularly in the crisis comms area. I found myself being pulled into more and more “war rooms” over the past three years, since birthing AnyContext, and decided it was time to create a more formal approach to the way companies think about ethics in their overall approach to design, marketing, and communications.
Why are we focused on ethical behavior now? As someone that has helped brands develop a story around their product, what has changed in the industry to cause this shift?
We’ve just started embracing technology so fast, we haven’t thought about their implications. Companies have been so focused on growth and breaking things that they didn’t stop to think about the effect it would have on users and their everyday lives. The iPhone came out in June 2007. We launched several games when Apple opened its platform. We did the same at the first F8 (Facebook’s developer conference) when apps became popular and a frenzy among developers who wanted to scale and grow audiences by piggybacking on Facebook’s growth.
At the time we didn’t realize how addictive, how invasive and how our data could be compromised. “We” I mean as in most end users. Today, we are seeing massive pushback because users are savvier and also want to support companies that mean something to them and whose brand reflects better values. Back then, it was just a free for all, a wild west, much of what we are seeing in the Blockchain/Bitcoin industry today.
Should companies only worry about the ethics of their product?
100%. It’s what will make or break them in the future. Look at Uber, Facebook, Google, etc. The news surrounding their communications and marketing practices have tarnished brand value and shareholder support/sentiment. That means losing money. And boards and shareholders don’t like that. So the obvious next step — let’s clean up our image. Take for example at the most recent F8, Facebook is now making privacy the news du jour and the hot ticket item of the year. Why? They have no choice.
Who’s responsibility is it to promote ethics within a company? Is it the product manager? Human resources? IT?
The CEO and corporate board/governance teams.
Consumers and privacy advocates have spent years protesting programs at tech companies but as of late employee-led protests have resulted in quicker action. Why do you think this is the case now?
It’s because those employees are also end users, parents, and a larger voice within the organization. They understand that change has to come from within. And they want to work for companies that mean something and care about their employees. Especially when said employee is spending more than 10 hours a day working on products that those companies make billions off of.
What steps can tech companies take to ensure that their products are ethical?
They have to choose to think about the long term effects of that technology. They have to work with third-party partners, like leveleleven, to work with them to understand best practices and implement new ways of thinking and approaching growth and transparency with their end users/customers.
Your firm recently launched LevelEleven as a solution to ethical issues at tech companies. Please explain the thinking behind this offering.
The impetus was that crisis can be averted first and foremost and you can mitigate that by having the right tools and counsel as to how to do it. You can call us to handle the crisis, sure, but we’d rather you not have one in the first place. And if you do, you know exactly how to handle it. You can also read my thoughts about it here. Growth doesn’t have to be shady, your product can be sold if you show you care about your customers. It’s all about the message and the way you tell that story and the way you design those products. It can be done.
There are currently debates about whether tech companies should be working with governments. Do you have a stance on this and how should companies think about this from an ethical perspective?
Yes. There will be a need to create a structure and dialogue between how consumers are protected from BOTH government and corporations. That is an entirely new set of questions. But it does need to be tackled. That’s also one of the areas in which we are very interested in exploring and learning more about. Much like the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) exists for advertisers, there should be that type of counsel and organization for privacy and ethics practices. The fact that we have GDPR compliance integrations now is a good start. But we need to do more as companies continue to invade our home with more and more “smart” devices.
Users need to be armed with the right information about who and what they are letting into their homes and how that information is going to be used in a very clear and honest way. And that’s not been happening. It’s usually something breaks, there’s a breach or the Wall Street Journal does an investigative report and the news leaks.
Companies need to OWN that narrative and also hold THEMSELVES accountable from the start. It seems like an easy thing to do, but it’s not. There are a lot of layers to the compromises that large companies have to make in regards to data and user privacy and to date they haven’t been doing much to protect it, so now, the backlash has forced their hand and it shouldn’t have to be that way.
Please recommend some resources that people can look for more information about how to be ethical.
Please support and visit The Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, and Stanford University also announced an initiative late last year.
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Special thanks go out to Vanessa Camones for participating in this discussion. “10 Questions” is a project designed to learn more from the people in tech and how it relates to businesses. If you’d like to be interviewed, I’d love to hear from you — send me a note on Twitter (@thekenyeung), Facebook, or here on LinkedIn. You can also find this entire series shared on Flipboard and also on Medium.
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