The federal Trade Commission is going to be looking at setting guidelines and standards for best practices for the online marketing industry and consumers. The FTC is suggesting that bloggers and social media marketers who use false statements about products they promote will be held liable. If the proposed guidelines come into effect, affiliate publishers and marketers will need to use the same sort of strategies and care that traditional publishers and infomercial producers do.
This is part of the FTC’s advertising-practices divisions effort to “update guidelines that are 30 years old.”
The FTC commissioners will be voting on the new proposed guidelines later in the summer. This is part of the new regulation-minded administration in Washington that wants to set better standards, definitions and best practices in the online marketing industry.The administration will be formalizing many areas of our business’s framework from paying taxes to outlawing unethical business practices.
The online marketing industry is still very young and has been allowed to have too much undefined grey area for marketers and consumers. This effort will cause some initial pain and awkwardness for some of our online marketing community, but in the long run our industry will greatly benefit. This will create a more solid foundation and greater credibility for growth – especially in the the performance marketing segment of our markets.
We will be launching a compliance resource center in our platform for our advertising and affiliate publisher partners. The center will be updated with all the new policies and procedures plus other hosted compliance solutions. We are looking forward to our industry’s next evolution in becoming a more mature and vibrant business. Stay tuned and also make sure to reach out to us if you need any help understanding the many moving parts of compliance and our markets.
©by Peter Bordes : Apr 28, 2009