FTC Issues Updated Guidelines for Endorsements

This entry was posted October 9th, 2009 and has no nomments.

This week, the FTC issued updated guidelines governing how companies use endorsements and testimonials in their advertising and marketing. The FTC press release cites three specific groups that will be most affected by these changes. Let’s take a look at these groups and how the changes may affect certain businesses.

Testimonial Advertisers:
From the FTC , “Under the revised Guides, advertisements that feature a consumer and convey his or her experience with a product or service as typical when that is not the case will be required to clearly disclose the results that consumers can generally expect. In contrast to the 1980 version of the Guides – which allowed advertisers to describe 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.”

This change will have a significant and immediate impact on diet/exercise/weight loss advertisers. Where as before they could include the simple disclaimer of “results not typical”, they now have to tell you the average results that you can expect.

The headline will go from, “Becky lost 40 pounds in 2 months!” (Results not typical); to “Becky lost 40 pounds in 2 months!” (You can expect to lose 5-10 pounds in 2 months based on average user results). As you can see, this is a change that could have a serious impact on businesses in this industry.
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