Federal Regulators say the same legal standards that applied to those old-skool print ads also apply online — even to short-form media like Facebook and Twitter.
From the Wall Street Journal:
Whether it is including the average effectiveness of a weight-loss shake or noting that a celebrity was paid to push a product in a Twitter post, marketing company need to apply the same standards to online ads as they long have to older media, according to guidelines released Tuesday by the Federal Trade Commission.
That means making room for full disclosure even in a 140-character tweet on Twitter.
The agency suggested that marketers could flag Twitter ads by including “Ad:” (three characters) at the beginning of the post or the word “sponsored” (nine characters).
Also…
The FTC said marketers need to be conscious of the location of disclosures and ensure that users can still see them easily on a smartphone.
If a company can’t find a way to make its disclosure fit the constraints of social or mobile ad, it needs to change the ad copy so that it doesn’t require a disclosure, the agency said, making that point explicit for the first time.
Disclosures must be clear enough that they aren’t “misleading a significant minority of reasonable consumers,” the FTC said.
The Journal offers up an example or two (apparently provided by the FTC), but it’s mostly common sense stuff. Seems only logical to me (and I’m touchy about misleading advertising), but I could easily envision an instance when a copywriter might feel pressured to fudge disclosure “just this once.”
Pointing out the FTC thinks that’s a bad idea should help you avoid doing something stupid. And yeah, lest we forget, it’s the ethical thing to do.
Keep writing (and disclosing), Tom Chandler
Hey Tom,
Then you have the out-and-out illegal ads — despite Twitter’s policies. For example, pharmaceutical ads are banned in Canada except for “reminder” ads (I think they are in most places in the world, with the US being a notable exception). Yet as far as I know — and despite implying that the company includes international laws under its “Comply with Legal Requirements” section — Twitter has done little to enforce their own rules and block these ads.
When it comes down to it, any ad that does not comply to FTC regulations (never mind an agency outside the US) would be very hard to prosecute. Shaq gets $10 million to shoot a Sprite commercial, then he tweets he’s drinking a Sprite… did he get paid for that tweet? Not necessarily. There are so many ways to sidestep this sort of thing. Besides, can you see a jury siding with the FTC and making Shaq pay millions of dollars for a casual tweet?
I’m all for complying with regulations, but the reality is that it is hard to understand where the line is in social media and harder to enforce, even in clear-cut cases of violations.
(I suspect that there may also be a direct correlation to the impact of these “ads” — if they were more effective, regulators would be faster to jump on them…)
~Graham
Graham Strong(Quote) (Reply)
Agreed, prosecution is unlikely, even in high-profile cases. And the idea that largely unmoderated, highly automated social media platforms would bother to enforce standards is also amusing.
I thought the story was significant for the legal cover it might afford a copywriter who was being pressured to do something unethical and illegal by a client.
One of the less-savory aspects of social media marketing is the growth (and apparently growing acceptance) of stealth marketing techniques, where marketing messages are passed through the media channel as if they were genuine social media content.
Sometimes our bright, shiny new digital marketing frontier looks a little dark around the edges.
TC(Quote) (Reply)