I'm not going to try to sell you anything on this blog. There will be no sunshine positive product reviews, no links to the latest gadget, product or device. I'm not going to promote so much as a specific brand of legal dictionary. This blog is purely for informational and reference purposes only. It's a blog (or "blawg" if you're a law geek, hardee har har) that covers developments in the law that affect web publishers and advertisers. That's it. No more, no less.
Oh, it's not that I'm not "that kind of guy." It's not that I'm above prostituting myself for money. Come on, I'm a lawyer. It's that the Federal Trade Commission just made that kind of stuff illegal. Sort of.
The "FTC" (that's hipsterspeak), which is the US Agency responsible for consumer protection, just revised its Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising (the "Guides"). The Guides cover the use of endorsements and testimonials in advertising and was last updated before MTV was even born, so it needed a revision like Charlie's Angels needed a makeover. The new Guides went into effect on December 1, 2009, officially bring advertising regulation into the Internet age. The Guides have a significant impact on what advertisers can do to market their products online.
Suppose a blogger receives a free game system and then posts a favorable review of it on her blog. Under the revised Guides, she will have to clearly and conspicuously disclose that she received the gaming system free of charge. Likewise, if an employee of an MP3 manufacturer posts positive comments about his company's device on a message board, the revised Guides require him to clearly and conspicuously disclose his relationship to the company in that post.
Essentially, the Guides require marketers to disclose material connections between themselves and their endorsers and it requires that such endorsements reflect the honest opinions, findings, beliefs, or experience of the endorser. The Guides make both the marketer and the endorsers liable for false statements made by endorsers. Experts (i.e. not me) expect this to have a material impact on the way many companies use current (blogs) and developing (social networking sites) online platforms for marketing their products.
But what's the fun of reading reviews on Amazon if you know who the actual voice behind the review is, you ask? I hear you. All of this transparency and honesty kind of go against the whole intention of the Internet, doesn't it? It's all part of the plan of this new administration to actually enforce the laws, particularly with respect to consumer protection and privacy. It's all kind of frightening, but that's a story for another post.