The Federal Trade Commission is taking a hard look at marketing and advertising statements, making sure they are precise and accurate.
Here are some key takeaways from recent enforcements:
- Beware of statements like:
- #1, leading, the leading
- [Ensures] Compliance with law, X% compliant with law
- 98% accurate, boasting 98% accuracy
- the [first and] only automatic solution
- achieve compliance within 48 hrs
- ensure continued compliance
- Don’t bury compliance caveats in Terms of Service, blog posts or other sub-pages of your website.
- Be precise about the benefits, performance or efficacy of your product or service.
- If you trained your product only on one LLM, do not say it was trained on others.
- When substantiating that a representation is true, ensure that you possess and rely upon competent and reliable evidence that is sufficient in quality and quantity and based on standards generally accepted in the relevant fields when considered in light of the entire body of relevant and reliable evidence.
- This means: tests, analyses, research, studies or other evidence based on the expertise of professionals in the relevant area, that (1) have been conducted and evaluated in an objective manner by qualified persons and (2) are generally accepted in the profession to yield accurate and reliable results.
Regarding advertising:
- Do not post or cause to be posted reviews, articles and blogs (collectively, “reviews”) on third-party websites that are formatted to appear as though they are the opinions of impartial authors and publications.
- You can’t state that your service guarantees a certain amount of savings if that isn’t factually true.
- Never manipulate Google search results so that more positive content appeared, pushing negative content and user criticisms lower in the list of web search engine results.
- Always disclose any material connections with endorsers that might materially affect the weight or the credibility of the endorsement and that connection is not reasonably expected by the audience.
- If you are notified that you have an ad posing as an article/study you must address it immediately (including notifications about things said online like comments).
Re: Enrollment
- You can’t enroll people in a service without making it clear when they would be charged. It should also be clear that they are enrolling.
- If you say you will charge at a certain time, you can’t charge before it.
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