The latest changes change Testimonial Advertisements, Bloggers and Celebrity Endorsements.
Under the revised Guides, advertisements that feature a consumer and convey his or her experience with a product or benefit as typical when that is not the case will be required to clearly tell the results that consumers can generally expect. In contrast to the 1980 version of the Guides, which allowed advertisers to clarify unusual results in a testimonial as long as they included a disclaimer such as “results not typical”, the revised Guides no longer contain this safe harbor.
The revised Guides also add new examples to illustrate the long standing principle that “material connections” (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers, connections that consumers would not expect, must be told. These examples address what constitutes an endorsement when the message is conveyed by bloggers or other “word-of-mouth” marketers. The revised Guides specify that even as decisions will be reached on a case-by-case basis, the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is painstaking an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must tell the material connections they share with the seller of the product or benefit. Likewise, if a company refers in an advertisement to the findings of a research organization that conducted research sponsored by the company, the advertisement must tell the connection between the advertiser and the research organization. And a paid endorsement, like any other advertisement, is unrepresentative if it makes fake or misleading claims.
Details are available at the Federal Trade Fee’s website.
The Federal Trade Fee (FTC) is an independent agency of the United States government, established in 1914 by the Federal Trade Fee Act. Its principal mission is the promotion of ‘consumer protection’ and the elimination and prevention of what regulators perceive to be harmfully ‘anti-competitive’ affair practices, such as coercive monopoly. An overview of the FTC is available at Wikipedia.
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