Commercial Alert Targets P&G, Wants Buzz Marketing Probe

The nonprofit Commercial Alert has sent a letter (pdf) to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), requesting that it investigate whether buzz marketers are violating federal law that prohibits deceptive advertising, MarketingVOX reports. The letter asks the FTC to review what it terms “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.”

Ad industry attorneys have seen this coming and have recently come to view buzz marketing as a likely area of regulatory involvement and the enforcement of disclosure requirements, especially if people are compensated to participate in buzz programs by marketers and agencies.

In a rebuttal to a recent AdAge story about this topic, Andy Sernovitz, CEO of the Word of Mouth Association, wrote that, “Word of mouth is not about paying people to pretend they like something. Has that practice, known in the business as stealth marketing, happened in the past? Yes. Should it be done in the future? WOMMA emphatically says no.”

Commercial Alert specifically urges that the FTC investigate Proctor & Gamble’s Tremor, which has enlisted some 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.