FTC Guidelines Session at BlogHer 2010 – What Has Changed After One Year?
A few of us from 360PR attended the BlogHer 2010 session entitled, “The FTC Guidelines: After A Year, Has Anything Changed?” The panel included BlogHer’s co-founder and CEO, Lisa Stone, marketer Susan Getgood, blogger Kimberly Coleman and Stacey Ferguson from the FTC who discussed whether the Guidelines have had any significant impact on how marketers and bloggers do business.
The FTC endorsement guidelines became final in December 2009, and Stacey Ferguson said, “The point of the guidelines is to ensure that there is no deception in advertising, and to provide transparency to consumers.” The FTC Guidelines are just that – they are guidelines, not laws. There are no fines for violating the FTC guidelines, but transparency is always best practice. The guidelines are intended to help consumers, endorsers and brands.
The main takeaway from the session for bloggers was to be absolutely sure they are always being transparent – their readers should understand their connection to the brand.
The panel encouraged bloggers to think about it more as valuing their relationship with their readers. If a blogger is endorsing a brand, the endorsement should be natural, clear and organic.
The FTC guidelines intentionally don’t tell bloggers how to make their disclosure because they want it to be in the blogger’s voice. Some suggestions:
- The best disclosure is always within context of the post or Tweet rather than at the end of a post or using a hashtag on Twitter that might not be clear, for example #sp (I didn’t know what that stood for and most consumers probably don’t either! #sp = sponsored post).
- There are three rules of thumb: make the endorsement clear, make it prominent and make it unavoidable.
The main takeaway for the brands was that at the end of the day it’s the brand’s responsibility to be sure endorsers are properly disclosing. Brands need to make it clear what they expect from their endorsers, but the disclosure should be in the blogger’s voice so it feels natural.
There seems to be some confusion regarding guidelines for traditional media versus bloggers, however, traditional media has always had to follow the same guidelines! The difference is that it’s about audience understanding. It is generally understood by the audience that traditional media is receiving products to review for free.
There was also discussion about celebrities and folks from the audience were wondering if celebrities get a free pass. Kim Kardashian has tweeted that she is craving a Carl’s Jr. salad. Even though she does receive a hefty $10,000 per sponsored tweet, the FTC called Kim Kardashian after she tweeted about the Carl’s Jr. salad to ask if she was contracted to do those tweets. The answer was no. Celebrities are not getting a free pass.
Do you think anything has changed after one year?
Nice post, Brett. It seems like the FTC guidelines were all anyone was talking about last year, and the chatter has died down significantly. It’s a little sad that celebrities can’t tweet about brands or products without the public assuming they’re being paid to do so, but i do agree that they need to disclose when being compensated.