Business Blog
Endorsement Guides: The FTC wants your feedback
Does your company use endorsements in your advertising? Or perhaps you endorse other companies’ products. Then you’ll want to follow the FTC’s just-announced regulatory review of its Endorsement Guides.
Every ten years or so, the FTC puts each of its rules and guides under the microscope. What’s the current state of the marketplace? What impact has the rule or guide had on consumers and businesses? Have there been changes in technology that warrant a closer look? Next on the regulatory review roster are the Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising and the FTC invites you to weigh in.
In place since 1980 and revised in 2009, the Endorsement Guides offer guidance to businesses and others about how established FTC advertising principles apply in this form of marketing. You’ll want to read the Federal Register Notice for a list of questions we’ve posed. One area of particular interest is the Guides’ requirement that material connections – connections between an endorser and a seller of a product that could affect the weight or credibility of the endorsement – must be clearly and conspicuously disclosed.
Once the Notice appears in the Federal Register, you’ll have 60 days to file a public comment.
It is your choice whether to submit a comment. If you do, you must create a user name, or we will not post your comment. The Federal Trade Commission Act authorizes this information collection for purposes of managing online comments. Comments and user names are part of the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) public records system, and user names also are part of the FTC’s computer user records system. We may routinely use these records as described in the FTC’s Privacy Act system notices. For more information on how the FTC handles information that we collect, please read our privacy policy.
The purpose of this blog and its comments section is to inform readers about Federal Trade Commission activity, and share information to help them avoid, report, and recover from fraud, scams, and bad business practices. Your thoughts, ideas, and concerns are welcome, and we encourage comments. But keep in mind, this is a moderated blog. We review all comments before they are posted, and we won’t post comments that don’t comply with our commenting policy. We expect commenters to treat each other and the blog writers with respect.
We don't edit comments to remove objectionable content, so please ensure that your comment contains none of the above. The comments posted on this blog become part of the public domain. To protect your privacy and the privacy of other people, please do not include personal information. Opinions in comments that appear in this blog belong to the individuals who expressed them. They do not belong to or represent views of the Federal Trade Commission.