What would happen if advertising told you what you could really expect from the product?  How much weight you could expect to lose, how likely the dating service will lead to a wedding? Sit back and find out…

In the spirit of this post, I should point out that I am not a lawyer or expert and everything below not in italics as quoted from FTC 16 CFR Part 255 represents idle speculation – I am certainly not being paid for my views!

Unless you are a blogger or advertising professional keeping a careful eye out for regulations in the U.S. you probably haven’t heard about the new FTC guidelines taking effect tomorrow, Dec. 1, 2009.  Unlike most such regulations this one one promises to be pretty entertaining to watch and I expect the lawsuits will start flying in short order (could be the most effective economic stimulus out there.)

The new guidelines concern endorsements and testimonials in advertising – read the actual text here.  There’s some heightened regulation of declaring affiliate relationships (like when I promote a product on Amazon) but the juicy stuff has to do with endorsements and testimonials across all media platforms, not just the web:

• Celebrities endorsing a product or service as one they really use have to actually being using it in their own lives when the advertising is created and if they stop using it, the advertising has to be pulled (hmmmm!) I don’t know who gets the job of seeing if famous people are wearing the underwear they’ve endorsed, just glad it’s not me. When the advertisement represents that the endorser uses the endorsed product, the endorser must have been a bona fide user of it at the time the endorsement was given. Additionally, the advertiser may continue to run the advertisement only so long as it has good reason to believe that the endorser remains a bona fide user of the product.

• And my personal favorite, the FTC has determined via their own testing that those ‘results not typical’ disclaimers in the fine print on the bottom don’t work. I don’t know why it took them so long to figure it out, but they finally did.  So now, if the advertiser does not have substantiation that the endorser’s experience is representative of what consumers will generally achieve, the advertisement should clearly and conspicuously disclose the generally expected performance in the depicted circumstances,… Endorsers in this case could be celebrities or ‘average’ people as seen on weight loss and dating advertisements.  Soooo…  those incredibly irritating eHarmony ads with the blissful ‘real’ couples will now need to tell us the typical experience of their other customers “clearly and conspicuously” which I’m guessing doesn’t mean in the fine print at the bottom.

I’m thinking there are going to be a lot of new advertisements debuting on American tv this December; whole new campaigns and creative wiggling going on.  For once this could be more entertaining than the shows they interrupt.