Web Moves Blog

What has got every internet marketer up in arms this week? If you have not heard, the FTC ( Federal Trade Commission, USA ) has released its final guidelines for advertisements using endorsements and testimonials.

In its press release on the FTC blog, the commission released two PDFS titled;

Guides Concerning the Use of : Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising – PDF

Revised Endorsement and Testimonial Guides – PDF

A combined behemoth of 94 pages, most of which is filled with legal jargon ( Hint – skip to the end of the first PDF and the second PDF, it has some easier to read scenarios and examples of what the FTC classifies as an endorsement etc ) .

While this author has not attempted to completely analysis the guidelines, which is a task too daunting at 3:31am, I have managed to find some great resources for our readers, that should help explain and clarify the report and its impacts.

Update: There is a great interview by Jim Edwards of igottatellyou.com with Mr. Rich Cleland, Assistant Deputy at The Federal Trade Commission that really clearifies a great deal of misconceptions of the new FTC guidelines. Thank you to @smbusinesscoach for the twitter update.

There is little doubt these new guidelines will impact most internet marketeers, but to what extent is still anyone’s guess and I am sure we will see some heated debates on the world wide web regarding this in the coming weeks.

It is my very early opinion that these guideline will become a standard practice such as privacy statements and terms & conditions of use. I also foresee the FTC will soon release a consumers guide or a layman’s guide to their guidelines which should help clear things up even more.

Some early reactions from internet marketers include ;

Imagine if government employees had to provide disclosure?  Can you see the laws with an *next to them *this law was paid for by the following lobbyists….

The following congressman went on long vacations compliments of the following companies…

If you have ever doubted the power Google holds today, look no further than this new law, this is exactly what Google wanted. No longer are paid posts against the Google webmaster guidelines, it is now against the law in the United States of America.

The interesting part about this is, that as long as your website is hosted outside of the US this law does not apply to you, and is unenforceable (I assume). Therefore one would think the indexing and ranking of websites that clearly are breaking this law could fall on the search engines displaying this content?

This is quite a massive move in the wrong direction by our government; one would think that our policy makers had better things to do with their time. How is possible that the US government is going to police this? How can they confirm that a disclosure is indeed required? Maybe lots of people like to blog about lots of various topics with lots of out going text links?

Since this would only apply to US based websites, I guess Google is going to place additional value on US hosted domains out going text links? Is Google going to devalue links from all other countries?

John Wieber –  SEOMoves.org

The team at Li’l Engine will post updates as they come in hand regarding the new FTC guidelines, for now I do think it is still too early to tell, but we hope the following resources will help you get a better grip on things.

• The Offical FTC Press Release
• Google Affiliate Blog Network
• Matt Cutts Blog – Some good comments
• Trademark Blog – Michael Gray & Ted Murphy on FTC Blog Regulations ( with recorded voice conference audio )
• PMA Blog – FTC Advertising Guidelines – Analysis ( PDF )
• disclosurepolicy.org – online disclosure policy generator

Have your own take on the new FTC guidelines? Please share them in the comments with our readers.

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