As part of its routine monitoring program, NAD asked ACT to provide substantiation for statements the company made online about its standardized college entrance test. NAD was concerned about whether ACT sufficiently disclosed the likelihood of cancellations due to COVID-19 and statements about test center availability. The decision is interesting because it sheds light on
NAD Finds That Humor Doesn’t Always Indicate Puffery
The American Association of Orthodontists ran a series of social media ads for Happy Mouth Now, a fictional teledentistry company, which showed consumers struggling with the company’s products. The ads are funny, unless you work for a non-fictional teledentistry company, in which case you’d likely choose another adjective to describe them.
SmileDirectClub challenged the ads
NAD Releases Tips for Influencer Marketing
This week, NAD released five tips on influencer marketing. Here are the tips, followed by some of our own observations.
1. When working with influencers or incentivizing consumers to review your product, you may be responsible for the content of their posts.
As we’ve noted in the past, if you work with an influencer
CARU Previews Changes, Calls for Diversity in Ads
The Children’s Advertising Review Unit (or “CARU”) has guidelines that apply to ads directed to children who are under 12 years old. A lot has changed since the guidelines were last updated in 2006, and CARU recently announced that it’s working on an update. At ACI’s Advertising Claims Substantiation Forum this month, I asked Angela
Penn State Football’s Super Bowl Claims Flagged on Social Media
In the days leading up to the Super Bowl, Penn State Football tweeted a graphic claiming that “a Penn Stater has
appeared in every Super Bowl.” Below that bold claim, in much smaller letters, appeared an important qualifier: “Except for five since 1967.”
Competitors were quick to flag the claim, and many touted their own
FTC Closing Letter Addresses Management of Consumer Reviews
When the FTC decides not to pursue an investigation, it often issues a short closing letter to the company explaining why FTC staff decided not to recommend enforcement. The letters are just a few paragraphs long and don’t contain a lot of details, but if you read between the lines, you can often get some
New Court Decision Address Manipulation of Reviews
Because consumer reviews are so important in today’s marketplace, many companies go to great lengths to increase their number of favorable reviews. Sometimes, they go too far. We’ve written about FTC and NAD cases in which companies incentivized reviews without proper disclosures and even about cases in which companies solicited fake reviews. (Click here,
NY Passes Law Governing Automatic Renewals
In recent years, a number of states have passed laws governing automatic renewals. New York is the latest state to jump on this trend. Its current law only applies to certain contracts “for service, maintenance, or repair to or for any real or personal property.” The new law, which will become effective in February 2021,
NAD Considers Meaning of “Best Possible” Claims
Comcast recently challenged a number of claims that AT&T made about its Wi-Fi services in two blog posts on the AT&T website. The posts claimed that the company provided the “best possible Wi-Fi experience,” the “best possible in-home connections,” and the “best possible home internet experience.”
Comcast argued that consumers would read the posts to
Peloton Faces Uphill Ride on “Ever-Growing” Claims
Peloton Interactive sells exercise bikes and treadmills that can stream live and on-demand fitness classes. For a while, the company advertised that its library of classes was “ever-growing.” Although that may have been true when the company first made the claim, things changed. In response to a lawsuit related to the music used in some