The US has announced a crackdown on product endorsements. For years, we’ve all been used to seeing celebs and models hawking everything from car insurance to beauty products, but surprisingly this ruling isn’t limited to Iggy Pop or Sarah Jessica Parker – it includes bloggers too.
The new rules say that anyone endorsing a product must give full disclosure about what he or she received – if anything – in compensation for the endorsement or else face fines up to $11,000.
Oddly enough, an attorney for several advertising groups in the States said this ruling is the ‘worst fears of businesses have come true’. That seems a bit of an overreaction to me. It won’t be a surprise to people that celebs are paid to endorse products (or even lie about them), and most bloggers I know already do disclose the terms in which they’re either endorsing or reviewing a product, i.e. So-and-so asked me to review, I wasn’t paid for this post, etc.
I’m curious to hear what other bloggers think, but my hunch is that we spend so much time trying to prove that we haven’t sold out that this ruling (should it ever make its way across the pond) won’t change very much at all.
14 October, 2009 at 9:17 pm
We don’t publicly endorse anything on our blog and have yet to be approached by a company to use our blog as a promotional platform, but we feel that it’s important that we disclose when we’re writing about a client, whether it’s on our blog or through Twitter. I read recently that it’s a major faux pas of PR companies like ours when they don’t disclose that they’re talking about clients. We’ve adopted this as a best practice and tried hard to be open about such things.
I wrote a post the other day about the power of word of mouth and when it comes to blogs, I’d say that the best social media acts as a logical extension of word of mouth. When a blogger talks about their experiences, their readers tend to take it to heart and that will certainly influence their purchasing decisions (see the Dooce vs. Maytag incident as written up by Forbes http://www.forbes.com/2009/09/02/twitter-dooce-maytag-markets-equities-whirlpool.html)
There have been times where something I’ve read on a personal blog has impacted my purchasing decisions, and I’d bet I’m not alone in this experience. If the post on the personal blog had really been advertorial disguised as editorial, I think I’d have a problem with that. Perhaps the penalties for not disclosing that its a paid endorsement are a bit hefty, but it’s a slippery slope (see the death of the music business due to downloading) and in my opinion, it’s best to nip it in the bud now rather than try to put the toothpaste back in the tube later.
3 November, 2009 at 7:20 pm
Gosh, this is a big grey area.
My blog includes shout outs to products that I use and love, shout outs to sites/products that I’ve recieved to review and affiliate links to relevent products.