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FTC .Com Disclosures Guidance: What’s new for bloggers and social media influencers

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Disclaimer: Still not a lawyer

Earlier this week, the FTC released an updated version of its .Com Disclosures guidance for digital advertising, originally published in 2000. While there is some new information here for bloggers and social media influencers who produce sponsored content for advertisers (and I will get into that below), the document’s principal goal is to provide guidance for proper disclosure of advertising claims in digital, and especially mobile, advertising in light of new technologies. Much like the changes in the endorsement guides in 2009 that were prompted, in part, by the rise of social media and blogs.

Simply put,  the FTC is making sure that, as ad delivery technology changes, claims are properly disclosed and not “lost” in the translation from web to mobile displays.

From the social media perspective, most of the information related to accuracy of claims and disclosure of relationships is the same as is covered in the 2009 Guidance on Endorsements and Testimonials. In other words, there isn’t all that much new here. You still  need to disclose material relationships with brands, in a clear and conspicuous manner proximate to your endorsement, and both you and the sponsor have an obligation to be accurate in your claims about a product. Read my detailed analysis of the examples in the 2009 guide if you want more detail.

Is there anything new here for bloggers? Why yes. It’s not a lot but it’s very nice. The .Com Disclosures document includes new examples that will make it easier for people creating sponsored content to comply with the FTC Guidelines, as well as clarity on the proper ways to disclose additional required information about product claims.

The examples:

Where and how to disclose. As far back as 2009, the FTC was already publicly recommending that disclosures not be buried at the bottom of a post or on a separate page (Once More With Feeling: FTC guidelines, bloggers and companies). Now, however, we have an explicit example.

Takeaway: Do not put your disclosure solely at the bottom of your post.

Recommendation: Include a brief disclosure at the top and if necessary, provide additional details at the bottom.

Note that the FTC also explicitly stated that the form of the disclosure should match the content. If it is a video or sound file, the disclosure should be done in the native format — ie in the video or recording, not simply included in a post or annotation on a social site. The disclosure needs to travel with the content.

However, the exact words you use to disclose? Still up to you.

How to disclose in short-form environments like Twitter. The FTC has always said that the disclosure must be proximate to the endorsement. While common sense would indicate that this means in every sponsored Tweet or Facebook post in which an endorsement appears (and that’s certainly how we handle it at BlogHer), that’s not what was happening on Twitter. Not by a long shot. So, the .Com disclosures have a series of terrific examples of the wrong and right ways to disclose on Twitter. Key points:

  1. The disclosure must be in every Tweet. You can’t tweet a single disclosure that covers the whole conversation; there is no guarantee that readers will see the disclosing statement.
  2. The hashtag #spon is not sufficiently clear.
  3. The word “ad” is sufficiently clear, but needs to be in a prominent place. The FTC also suggests not using a #ad hashtag after a URL or shortlink as it could be overlooked.

Recommendation for a best practice:

  • Do include an “umbrella” tweet or post that explains the sponsored content you are about to tweet/post. It is good information for your followers, but as above, not sufficient in itself. For example: “So excited to be here as a guest of #BIGHOTEL at the Super Duper Event #ad”
  • Use #ad to disclose along with any hashtag the sponsor has requested, but NOT proximate to any URLs in your tweet/update. Make sure the disclosure stands out.

The .Com Disclosures also included one other tidbit that was clearly aimed at advertising disclosure of claims, but is valuable for bloggers as well. When an advertising  claim merits a longer disclosure than is practical for the format, a hyperlink to  additional information is acceptable, provided that anything material, or “triggering” is included in the original advertisement and  the link is clear and conspicuous.  In other words, you cannot bury CRITICAL disclosures in hyperlinked pages, but you can provide additional details.

“Hyperlinks allow additional information to be placed on a webpage entirely separate from the relevant claim. Hyperlinks can provide a useful means to access disclosures that are not integral to the triggering claim, provided certain conditions (discussed below) are met. Hyperlinked disclosures may be particularly useful if the disclosure is lengthy or if it needs to be repeated (because of multiple triggering claims, for example).
However, in many situations, hyperlinks are not necessary to convey disclosures. If a disclosure consists of a word or phrase that may be easily incorporated into the text, along with the claim, this placement increases the likelihood that consumers will see the disclosure and relate it to the relevant claim.
Disclosures that are an integral part of a claim or inseparable from it should not be communicated through a hyperlink. Instead, they should be placed on the same page and immediately next to the claim, and be sufficiently prominent so that the claim and the disclosure are read at the same time, without referring the consumer somewhere else to obtain this important information.” — from the .Com Disclosures Guide. Emphasis mine.

This could be extremely useful for sponsored programs for products and services in highly regulated industries. The sponsored post would still have to meet all the requirements for accuracy, with any critical product claims disclosed in the post, but bloggers wouldn’t have to include all the “fine print” in their posts.

So, some nice clarity for some critical areas. But nothing to get too worried about.

Unless you are creating deceptive mobile ads for weight loss products or jewelry!

Additional resources:

FTC FAQ on the Endorsement Guides (2010)

Eleven Urban Myths about the FTC Guidelines

Super Bowl ads, quick take

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Full confession: I did not watch the Super Bowl last night. I did not see the half time show during which I understand Beyoncé sang 😉 I couldn’t even bring myself to watch all the ads this morning on the Internet.

It’s not even that Super Bowl advertising has “jumped the shark,” although I largely agree with Deb Rox’s post on BlogHer, that the creativity of Super Bowl advertising continues to suffer, especially when compared to the creativity of good user-generated media. But let’s not kid ourselves, UGC isn’t all sunshine and rainbows either. Some of it is pretty awful too.

I also am not misty-eyed over the old days. There was plenty of cruddy advertising back then too. We just forget the awful ones.

Of course, one person’s trash is another’s treasure. With a few exceptions, — those truly outstanding adverts that rise above every year — there are as many opinions about which ads were the best as there are actual ads. For example, many people love the talking babies. I just think they are creepy. Always have. Always will. And I will not watch GoDaddy commercials. Period.

Overall, I thought last night’s crop was pretty uninspired. Here are a few that I liked:

My favorite ad of the evening didn’t even air during the Super Bowl, but was merely teased during the Iron Man 3 spot – an Iron Man extended look on Facebook:

Facebook just wants “to be a real boy”

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This is the time of year when some folks trot out the tarot cards and crystal balls, and attempt to predict the coming year. And others wax eloquent (mostly)  on what transpired in the year just past. Over the 7 years I have been writing this blog, I have generally tried to stay away from this sort of post.

This year, however, that is pretty much what you are going to get. There are a few trends that I have been watching for a while now, always intending to post about them but never quite having  the time. Here’s the first.

Facebook  just wants “to be a real boy” and become a social content platform.

Facebook gets lots of eyeballs — 800 million active  worldwide users, 50% of whom access it everyday according to the company’s stats page. And the boys behind Facebook are smart cookies; they know they need to give people a reason to keep coming back. But, it seems like they aren’t entirely sure that catching up with friends and family and sharing “stuff”  is unique and defensible enough. And mining user data only works if you keep the users.

So they’re hitching their horses to the content wagon, and setting themselves up to be a content platform. Brand pages, apps, timelines and other enhancements designed to make Facebook a source of information, not just connection.

Brands are diving right in. Everyone has a Facebook landing page, contest or app. The ubiquitous URL in advertising has given way to the Facebook like and share buttons.

At the end of the day though, the Facebook platform is inherently hostile to robust content development. It was developed for short form messages and social connections, and layering apps and other tools to make it more content friendly doesn’t make it so.

But we’re sure as shootin’ going to try. Facebook has the eyeballs that brands want, and doesn’t want them to go elsewhere.  The more of our activities and transactions it can own, the better that database gets.  In the coming year,  more and more brands will shift content to Facebook that in the “old days”  would have been on brand-owned microsites.

The $25K question is, will they really recognize sufficient benefit from being on the Facebook platform to make up for the inherent unfriendliness of the platform to branding and deep content. Not to mention the murky area of who owns what on Facebook….

The more transactional, ephemeral and social the content, the more successful the efforts will be. Deep thinking? Complex topics? I just don’t see Facebook as a hospitable place for this. The Facebook brand page just doesn’t have enough branding to make the brands happy, or enough information to make the consumer happy. For one thing,  all the custom developed apps bypass one of the key benefits of Facebook, the simple user interface.

Brands will try, but in the end, I think the winning strategy will continue to be to link into the social graph to promote or aggregate content that lives elsewhere on microsites and blogs. This allows the brand to leverage the social aspects of Facebook, but still own their own robust content platforms.

Unfortunately, at the moment, things are moving in another direction,  and 2012 is going to be the year of bigger and splashier brand pages on Facebook.

Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.

Customer-centric marketing, the power of personal testimony and getting your listening ears on

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This past summer, when I was interviewing for jobs, I drafted the notes below for a follow-up meeting with a tech company (that ultimately did not happen.) Re-reading them recently, I realized they would make a decent post about the marketing process, so I stripped out the specifics.

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Marketing is a process that combines art and science. The more grounded your art is in your science, the more repeatable the process and the more successful you will be. The marketing plan also relies on many different inputs — including the expertise and experience of all the members of the team, past results, market research, data from the field and customer feedback. You can’t develop a marketing plan without the data and the team contributions.

Budget and timing are also factors.  When it comes to marketing tactics, there’s fast, cheap and everything in between. Typically, the most cost effective tactics take time to build before bearing fruit,  and when the situation demands fast results, it usually comes with a higher price tag.

To answer the question, What would you do?, you need to start with some more questions.

  • Who is the customer? How many of them are there in market?
  • What is the product she needs/wants? How well does the product we have match up to what she wants? This helps us understand market potential of a segment. We’re looking for the best fit with the largest possible number of customers. A perfect fit for a very small number of consumers is not sustainable, unless you’ve got a luxury product with high price tag and great margins.
  • What is the emotional driver for the purchase? How can we find a way to differentiate our product based on a dimension that matters to the customer? This is especially critical when you are trying to expand into a new market segment. You may have a very clear understanding of how your product fits the emotional needs of the your initial  customer segment, but no clear idea of how to appeal to a new group, even though you understand that there is an appeal.

For example, take end user security software like anti-virus and spam filtering. For the core customer of these products —  the 25-50 year old technology enthusiast  — the emotional purchase drivers are met by feeds, speeds and features.  He knows he needs security software for his PC  and can be swayed by product excellence, even at a higher price, because being the smartest guy with the best product satisfies an emotional need.

However, if a product is perceived as a commodity, the consumer is likely to be very price sensitive. That one product is better than the others won’t matter as much, unless it also happens to be the cheaper one.

Other segments, like retirees or moms, are less interested in the technical aspects of these products. They need to understand the benefits to them  AND that it won’t be difficult or expensive to obtain the benefits. Their emotional satisfaction in computer use does not come intrinsically from the computer and its operation. They use the computer to do something, and it is in the “something” that we find the emotional driver upon which to base messaging.

  • Where and how does she buy? Who does she trust when making a purchasing decision? We know referral is the best advertising. What referrals matter to this customer? Consumer electronics sales people ( a la Best Buy)? Friends and neighbors? How does this customer weigh testimonials from experts versus “people like me.”

This approach is a customer-centric marketing approach. You’ve got to put the process in place to find out what motivates and excites the target population, and then use this learning in marketing strategy and product development.

Once you have process in place, it is duplicable market to market. You still need creative ideas and the flash of intuition that reveals the killer idea for a specific marketing campaign, but you can’t get to those without the base.

The customer-centered approach is the first leg on the marketing “stool.” The other two are the power of personal testimony and listening posts.

The Power of Personal Testimony

Product messaging should always be grounded in customer experiences, but from their frame of reference, not the product. Consumer product goods companies understand this. In their mass market advertising anyway. No one tugs at the heartstrings better. A brand of laundry soap gets your clothes cleaner, but what it REALLY does is make you happy. Technology companies have a harder time understanding that it’s not the product that matters. It’s what the product lets us do, feel, understand etc.

And when I say customer experiences, I mean the real customers, not the hypothetical customers created in ad and PR agency conference rooms. The consumer has many ways to make her voice heard, from traditional customer service channels in your company to online reviews, social networks and blogging.

Tap into the real personal testimony.

For example, back to our spam filter example. Instead of advertisements in which the consumer thanks the computer security company  for protecting her computer, have her talk about how her life is easier/better now that she has the freedom to shop online and let her kids use the Internet without worrying about viruses, stalkers and identity theft.

Brand evangelist programs and user-generated content (especially video) are another effective way to tap into the power of personal testimony.

Of course in order to really tap into your customers as endorsers, you have to be listening to them.

Getting Your Listening Ears On: Establish online listening posts

You need an active online listening program to understand what is being said about your brand and the overall category online. Capturing online reviews, and feedback from customer service and your sales channels only scratches the surface. These channels capture the folks who really like you or really hate you.

A company needs to grasp the  “muddle in the middle” — what average folks say about a company, competitors and the product category in online forums other than the company’s own.  What they say about their lives and needs even when they do not mention products at all.

This acts as an online focus group and gives valuable  visibility into what the consumer really cares about.  This information can then be used to develop marketing programs, customer service offerings and new products.

Does active listening replace the need for things like focus groups and market research? Of course not. Traditional methods still offer tremendous value to the marketing task, particularly when it comes to measurement. Monitoring is largely dependent on the organic conversation. We’re just eavesdropping. To find out whether we’ve been successful with our programs, we need to ask specific questions, and the old research stand-bys are very relevant to that task.

If you don’t listen? It’s like a child sticking his fingers in his ears. You may not look as ridiculous but it’s just as stupid. And ultimately ineffective.

A refreshing change from Super Bowl ads – the Pepsi Refresh Project

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cross posted to Snapshot Chronicles

The Super Bowl is pretty much the only athletic contest in the world where the television advertisements during the event get nearly as much media coverage as the event itself. Likewise the run-up and hype of the commercials. Will the network will sell all the space? Who will run ads, how much will they pay and what will they promote?

Before the ads even run, the pundits are postulating and after, they dissect them.

It’s a bit obscene really — and full disclosure, I’ve played the game on my blog in past years.

This year, though, the real news is who is NOT advertising during the Super Bowl. Instead of spending a hefty chunk of change on a few spots during the football game, Pepsi launched the Pepsi Refresh Project. For the next year,  the company is giving away $1.3 million dollars per month to community development projects submitted and selected online by the public.

Anyone can submit a grant. Pepsi will accept 1000 every month, and the public can vote for up to 10 projects every day.

Of course, the company is getting a lot of media, and social media, coverage for the campaign, and I imagine they are also spending a pretty penny on the infrastructure to support the project with their ad, PR and interactive agencies. I’m sure they have high expectations for positive revenue as well as brand awareness results from the project.

What makes this campaign so exciting is the scale of the grants. Other companies have done similar projects to fund charities through community submission and vote. For example American Express. But I can’t think of anything from corporate America that matches the scale of Pepsi Refresh.

It is truly refreshing to see a company do so much potential good. I’ve got no problem if they “do good” as a result.

In fact, I’d love to see more copycats.

Who’s next?