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Advertising and Marketing on the Internet: Rules of the Road
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John is an honest person, living in a certain country in this world. At a given time, John decided to publish an online newsletter. Is this a crime? Then John wanted as many people as possible to read and enjoy his work. So, he decided to distribute his newsletter free. Is this another crime? Since John could not work completely for free (we need money to live, right?), he started to sell advertising space in his newsletter. The things were going fine when suddenly FTC issued its "Advertising & Marketing on the Internet: Rules of the Road". "The FTC Act prohibits unfair or deceptive advertising in any medium. ... advertising must tell the truth and not mislead consumers." CORRECT! "[...] In addition, claims must be substantiated." WHAT? And the trouble came ... "Third parties [...] also may be liable for [...] disseminating deceptive representations if they participate in the [...] distribution of the advertising, [...]." WHAAAAT? I don't know why, but it always seems that when something is going well, someone must come along and destroy everything. The same goes for Cyber Space. Before the release of this FTC Act, I used to receive 2 or 3 unsolicited commercial messages per day. I don't know why, but the first effect that I noticed was that I now receive ten times more unsolicited messages ... Being a third party distributing advertising, the ezine publishers are responsible for substantiating all ad claims, prior to publication. What does this mean? That for every ezine ad John sells at the fabulous price of 3 or 4 bucks (try to calculate what net profit he makes!) he needs to spend a lot of time (that's money) to conduct researches in order to see if the claim from that ezine ad is not deceptive ... I wonder when John will have time to write his articles? Of course, the quality of his newsletter will go down. Please suppose that a certain person asks John to publish the following ezine ad: "Extremely nice house in Chicago. For sale. $500,000." Now, John is supposed to say, "Mr. Advertiser, in addition to your payment of $4, I also need you to prove that the house is yours, that the house is nice, that the house is in Chicago and that the house is worth that price." Thanks God the ad has only one single line :-) If the house is small and ugly, then the ad would be deceptive. Really, what do you think that the advertiser will reply? He will most likely send John a message letting him know how stupid John is and asking for his money back. How is John supposed to handle this? A scanned photo received by email from the advertiser is not enough. It may not be the photo of his house! Maybe John should go to Chicago, to see the house himself! What is the problem, right? For getting the price of the ad ($4) he will need to spend a couple of hundreds of dollars, right? Great deal! Would that make everyone happy? The advertiser would be happy because John didn't bother him with stupid questions. The FTC would be happy ... But what about John? Of course, as you may have guessed, John's subscribers are from all over the world. Now let's suppose that all governments decide to OVER protect their consumers like FTC, and begin releasing their own rules and guidelines. What will this mean? That using the few hundred bucks John earns per month selling advertising in his small ezine, he has to employ an army of lawyers to teach him English Law, German Law, and so on, in order to comply with every law. As I said before, John has subscribers from all over the world and they must be protected according to their government's rules. Will John be able to comply with all these rules and guidelines? Obviously not. He simply cannot do it because he is a HUMAN BEING publishing a newsletter. He's not a corporation, dear friends from FTC! I guess this means that John will break some laws ... So what is his crime anyway? John just wants to publish an online newsletter to be distributed FREE to everybody. Daily are published thousands of online ezines. I am subscribed myself to many of them. NOBODY complies with the above mentioned FTC rules simply because as I proved ... they are not applicable. I wonder why FTC is not trying to publish fair and applicable laws ... A law is good only if it's fair and applicable ...
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Adrian Jock is the publisher of
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Advertising and Marketing on the Internet: Rules of the Road - Another Point of View
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