Joining me this week is Josiane Martinez, the founder and CEO of ASG, one of my competitors whom I respect the most. She discusses a number of ethics issues including:
- How to weigh client success against potential harm to a community
- Why demographic data alone won’t tell you what your audience needs
- How to find common ground without agreeing on everything
Why don’t you tell us a little more about yourself and your career?
I’m the founder of ASG. We specialize in social marketing, which means that we use marketing and communications to encourage or improve behaviors that improve people’s lives.
That could mean helping someone enroll in health coverage or access services for their family or work. It’s often work that starts with listening, understanding what matters to people, what barriers they face, and how to make taking the next step easier.
What is the most difficult ethical challenge you ever confronted?
As a business owner and trying to make ends meet, and when you do social marketing, oftentimes you’re working with limited resources, and organizations have limited resources.
When opportunities come, we try to look at them and try to qualify that lead. I remember one of my most difficult decisions was when choosing which clients we’ll take on. I was offered an opportunity to work with a private online lottery service that wanted to expand into Puerto Rico. I’m Puerto Rican.
And that’s why I bring a different perspective to this work. The service was perfectly legal. There’s wasn’t anything wrong with it, and the opportunity was tempting because it was a big client, it could have become one of our biggest accounts, and, in years where, things don’t go necessarily as you want, you want to jump on those opportunities.
As a business owner, you think about what that revenue could mean for your company and your team and it’s tempting. But then I sat down and I kept coming back to the people we would be helping the company to reach. Especially people living in poverty with very little money to spare.
I asked myself, “What would success look like for this client?” and what could success mean for the people responding to our marketing? I was concerned that we could help drive spending by people who needed those limited resources for themselves and their families.
As a Puerto Rican, it felt especially personal for me. So, when we understand how to connect with communities and earn their trust, and that’s part of our bread and butter, we learn how to communicate with people and earn their trust.
So, I had to think carefully about how we will be using that ability. And ultimately, I declined the opportunity. Everything went fine, and I found other accounts. But I would say that’s one of the most difficult sometimes when, comes to qualifying clients.
The difficult part is weighing a significant opportunity for your business- against the potential consequences for the community.
It made me realize our responsibility begins before we write a message or launch a campaign. It begins with deciding whose goals we are willing to help advance.
And that’s part of the values of our company. So, we look at everything through those values too when it comes to qualifying who we want to work with.
Thinking beyond your own personal experience, what are you seeing as some of the key ethics challenges for today and tomorrow?
I think the biggest challenge that we see is how AI is going to be utilized. We had a chance to share together a couple of weeks ago the Public Relations Society of New England’s Northeast District Conference. I had a talk about how do we communicate in a world that is polarized, where each of us have different ways of looking at things.
AI is automizing processes, and making communication messages easier to create, easier to distribute. That’s the biggest challenge as humanity right now: to try to understand each other. To me that always starts with listening and trying to connect at a very personal level. Listening even if you don’t agree with the other side of the coin.
I often say that’s the data that doesn’t come through a survey, necessarily. It’s about really understanding and understanding the cultural, social, and economic circumstances that will prevent people from doing things or make them think the other way.
We don’t need to be 100% on the same page all the time to move forward as humans or as people. We could agree 25% of the time, or maybe 30% of the time. I even joke 75% of the time. When we find that commonality, we can move forward.
AI is happening. We’ve been using AI for a long time. We might feel a little bit more of a vibe right now, but everything from Google Search to Excel functions, that’s all AI.
What we need to learn about AI is that it is about augmenting the skills of people and not replacing us as communicators. You can’t just remove the human. The human always has to be in the loop.
I believe in a framework created by Dr. Fei-Fei Lee from the Institute of Human Center AI, based on human need to augment people’s abilities, not to replace it.
It has to respond to what people need, not the other way around. This technology has the power to help people if we use it correctly and we keep the human in the loop.
I think of multilingual work, for example translating when you go to Google, it’s the same thing. You go to Google, try to translate something. Don’t take that for granted because it could have many mistakes, and it could damage you.
Have someone that understands. It starts with your own prompt, and it needs to be evaluated by a human, but it could help augment the skills of many of us to become supercharged humans.
That’s some of the challenges that I see coming our way as communicators – how we can use AI to support our judgment because we still have to exercise it every time that we use it.
I was having a conversation earlier this week because we’re getting ready to update the PR Council’s AI ethics guidelines. One of the things that we were questioning is that human loop concept. In a way, is it too limiting? It makes us passive. It’s really human-led. We need to make sure we’re directing it. Not just- checking it, but it’s that insight and the strategy coming from us to have us help accomplish our goals.
You mentioned something else which I really loved, and I loved it in your session when we were at PRxNE. It was about how we’re not going to agree all the time. There’s so much othering going on right now on all sides of every issue. How do you work, particularly in social marketing, to help people understand and make sure we’re talking in an appropriate, inclusive way to the audiences.
All the data that people can get is useful, but you can only do so much. You can have the zip code, you can have the language, you can have the age, you can have the race, you can have all of those, but that doesn’t mean that you understand what’s going on in the particular life of the group that you want to move.
It starts with listening and spending time listening, deep listening. Deep listening means involving the people that you’re working with from the very beginning, not as an afterthought. “Okay I produced this campaign, Mark, go and translate it.” I hate that. I think we all do.
In reality what it takes is understanding that they are the ones who kick off the process of learning by sitting down and spending time. Oftentimes we call that formative research.
We need to spend time to understand all of those different intersectionalities that people might be living. Then we need to evaluate and go back to our objective. Constantly go back and check in. Not just, “Okay, we talked to you, bye.” or “Now I am going to put together the campaign, see you in a year, or maybe I don’t see you again.”
Creating a sounding board with the folks that are going to be impacted by your messages. It’s the best way to do it where you can come back during your campaign, and check in. It takes a lot of engagement.
That’s a way to start understanding that beyond that rejection, beyond the opposition, beyond the hesitancy, there might be points where it makes sense and you can agree. You might not be ready for to go to this training, but maybe if we start with English as a second language classes, that might take you to that training that we want to get you for new technology or solar technology or clean energy.
We’re seeing a lot of this in not-for-profits where people come with multiple issues. Right now, affordability is the number one issue that people are facing- … not being able to pay for the gas, not being able to pay for food, housing or healthcare.
When they approach services, we tend to say, “Okay, give me your number, I’m going to refer you to a call center.”
The last thing that they want is to be referred to is a call center. The chances are they’re never going to call that person. The other strategy is meeting people where they need.
“Okay you just got here at noon. Did you have lunch? Let’s start with that, “let’s sit down, let’s talk about…” Maybe they don’t need to be referred right away to a call center. Maybe you can connect them with citizenship help or with a food bank or whatever it is in the moment. That’s what creates trust, right?
There’s some KPIs you want to work with people. But you have to look at the entire holistic picture. This business of helping people improve their lives, you have to start somewhere. And when you’re starting that somewhere, that’s the 25% or the 30%.
What is the best piece of ethics advice you ever received?
I don’t have any specific person or advice that comes to mind. But one of the most important lessons I took from Siemens School of Management was the importance of principled leadership. Think about the ethical consequences of your decisions and your responsibility to people.
In 2013, a long time ago, I received the School of Management Alumni Association Principle Leadership Award. That recognition meant a lot to me back then, because it represents the kind of leader that I strive to be.
For me, principled leadership means asking more than, “Can this help out our business grow?” It’s more about who benefits, who could be harmed, and is this consistent with my values, the values that I bring to the company. That’s what I was thinking about with the lottery opportunity. The potential revenue mattered, but so did the consequences for the community we would be helping the company reach.
That’s the lesson I carry with me. Having influence comes with a responsibility and knowing how to create trust in the community. If you have that gift, if you’re able to use it in a special way, do so. That’s the piece of advice that I carry with me.
Is there anything else that I didn’t ask that you wanted to highlight?
What we need to do as communicators is continue to work together. What are some of the opportunities in which we can use our different skills to come together? At the end of the day, we can be competitors, but also be partners.
I have worked with many people in our orbit, and I think that’s important for us as communicators. We face some of the biggest challenges, which is how do we get people to talk to each other again.
Listen to the full interview with bonus content here:
- Progress Doesn’t Require Full Agreement - October 26, 2026
- Purpose, Profit, and AI: The Ethical Trade-Offs Every Organization Is Making Today - September 14, 2026
- Why kindness may be the most overlooked principle in ethical AI leadership - June 1, 2026
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