Commercial Alert Asks FTC to Investigate Buzz Marketers for Deception

Commercial Alert sent a letter today to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requesting it to investigate whether buzz marketers are violating federal law prohibiting deceptive advertising. The letter asks the FTC to review evidence that “companies are perpetrating large-scale deception upon consumers by deploying buzz marketers who fail to disclose that they have been enlisted to promote products. This failure to disclose is fundamentally fraudulent and misleading.”

Commercial Alert’s letter urges the FTC to thoroughly investigate Proctor & Gamble’s Tremor, which has enlisted about 250,000 teenagers in its buzz marketing sales force. “The Commission should carefully examine the targeting of minors by buzz marketing, because children and teenagers tend to be more impressionable and easy to deceive. The Commission should do this, at a minimum, by issuing subpoenas to executives at Proctor & Gamble’s Tremor and other buzz marketers that target children and teenagers, to determine whether their endorsers are disclosing that they are paid marketers.”

The letter states “Buzz marketing also is known as ‘guerrilla,’ or ‘stealth’ marketing. The terms are significant because they suggest the subterfuge that corporations are working on the buying public. They often are not promoting products and services openly, the way conventional advertising does. Rather they are enlisting people to promote products under the guise of doing something else….The Federal Trade Commission should require any and all persons who are paid to engage in such practices to disclose their relationship to the corporation whose products they are pitching, including their compensation. Failure to provide such disclosure should be considered ‘unfair or deceptive acts and practices in or affecting commerce’ within the meaning of the Federal Trade Commission Act.”

The full text of Commercial Alert’s letter to the FTC is available at: http://www.commercialalert.org/buzzmarketing.pdf.

posted by Consumer Help Web Editorial Team at 1:28 PM |