PART I. THE QUICK READ JUST FROM THE BLOGGER POINT OF VIEW
The FTC guidelines for endorsements have been published and can be found here. There are three main sections of interest to bloggers, and the marketers who support their voice.
1) Definition of endorsements/testimonials
2) What is required of the consumer contributors and marketers
3) Disclosing ties to marketers
Additionally, there is a fourth part that concerns only the marketer, which comes into play if they use/feature the blogger’s testimonial in an advertisement. Then, common sense would kick in that the content needs no less care than they apply when they write a scripted ad, such as claims reviews. I’ve not covered that here due to the inapplicability to bloggers on how marketers use their content, but will in future postings.
The FTC seems to be focusing on bloggers “because he or she is known to have wide readership within a particular demographic group that is the manufacturers’ target market.” By acting as the ‘speaker’ of the content, and also as the publisher of that content to their audience, the FTC seems to believe that the blogger was selected by the manufacturer to receive some benefit (ie free product, payment) because of the blogger’s direct ability to spread the message to their target market. The FTC seems to equate a blogger’s following with a celebrity’s following — and indeed celebrities are similarly covered in the new Guides. Essentially, the blogger was acting as a conduit for a marketing message to be delivered to his or her following. If the blogger chose to deliver that message, the blogger becomes part of the direct advertising chain.
While the main guidelines begin on page 55, there are a lot of interesting materials in the “Supplemental Information” that covers consumer generated content, including around pages 8-15, a39 and 51. I’ve summarized and tried to interpret from my non-legal reading of the document. The following are some more detail on the three main points for bloggers and other consumer contributors.
1) Definition of an endorsement or testimonial covered by the Guide
The FTC is saying that anytime there is a known, agreed upon tie between the blogger and marketer, this is an endorsement. Here is an example that they used to help you determine what they’re looking for as a tie between you and the marketer.
Example 8: A consumer who regularly purchases a particular brand of dog food decides one day to purchase a new, more expensive brand made by the same manufacturer. She writes in her personal blog that the change in diet has made her dog’s fur noticeably softer and shinier, and that in her opinion, the new food definitely is worth the extra money. This posting would not be deemed an endorsement under the Guides.Assume that rather than purchase the dog food with her own money, the consumer gets it for free because the store routinely tracks her purchases and its computer has generated a coupon for a free trial bag of this new brand. Again, her posting would not be deemed an endorsement under the Guides. Assume now that the consumer joins a network marketing program under which she periodically receives various products about which she can write reviews if she wants to do so. If she receives a free bag of the new dog food through this program, her positive review would be considered an endorsement under the Guides
The FTC included some “supplementary information” to help clarify their position, especially based on the thoughtful comments provided by some of our colleagues at WOMMA and BzzAgent. The FTC said that they would need to look at the overall relationship between the blogger and the marketer, such as:
Whether the speaker is compensated by the advertiser or its agent
Whether the product or service in question was provided for free by the advertiser
The terms of any agreement
The length of the relationship
The previous receipt of products or services from the same or similar advertisers or the likelihood of future receipt of such products or services
The value of the items or services received.
These would go into the decision whether the blogger was disseminating a marketing message to his or her following. My advice to bloggers is not to spend a lot of time trying to decide if you are covered by these definitions. If you’re not sure, err on the side that you are. The FTC believes that the advertiser selected you to blog about their content because you have influence with your audience. Therefore, the FTC wants to ensure that your communication over the audience you have built is taken seriously when an advertiser-requested message is attached.
2) Taking responsibility for what you say in your content
When something is considered an “endorsement” and covered by these Guidelines, what needs are your new responsibilities expected by the FTC? Basically, they want you to take responsibility for what you say and how far you go when describing the product benefits. You shouldn’t make product claims that aren’t your personal experience with or opinion of the product. For example, you shouldn’t say that the product will do the same thing for everyone since you don’t know that is 100% true. If you do, the FTC believes you should take responsibility for these claims that are misleading or not supported by evidence. That’s what marketers currently do when they write ads and tout claims. They have to back up everything they say with evidence.
The FTC believes that marketers should help guide you in the types of claims you can make, and monitor your content to make sure it conforms. However, it believes that you and the marketers share liability since you’re both in a relationship together.
An observation from the Guide: The FTC seems to take a position that if you speak about your personal experience with the product, and keep it to your own opinion of the product, that this may not be making a product claim. I’m not quite sure about this yet, but there was some language that seemed to imply that.
3) Your responsibility includes disclosing your relationship with the marketer
This section is simple to the extent it is what it says. If you have a relationship with the marketer, you should disclose it. As discussed in the definition of an endorsement, the relationship can include where you are paid or get free product. Again, my advice is not to quibble with whether you are covered, and simply disclose whatever relationship you have with the marketer. The Guides don’t really discuss how to disclose the relationship, but it should be obvious and clear to anyone that is reading your blog.
The blogger is also liable if she fails to disclose clearly and conspicuously that she is being paid for her services.
For example, an individual who regularly receives free samples of products for families with young children and discusses those products on his or her blog would likely have to disclose that he or she received for free the items being recommended. Although the monetary value of any particular product might not be exorbitant, knowledge of the blogger’s receipt of a stream of free merchandise could affect the weight or credibility of his or her endorsement – the standard for disclosure in Section 255.5 – if that connection is not reasonably expected by readers of the blog. Similarly, receipt of a single high-priced item could also constitute a material connection between an advertiser and a “sponsored” endorser.
If the blogger is actually paid by the advertiser or a third party acting on its behalf, disclosure certainly will be warranted.
Example 7: A college student who has earned a reputation as a video game expert maintains a personal weblog or “blog” where he posts entries about his gaming experiences. Readers of his blog frequently seek his opinions about video game hardware and software. As it has done in the past, the manufacturer of a newly released video game system sends the student a free copy of the system and asks him to write about it on his blog. He tests the new gaming system and writes a favorable review. Because his review is disseminated via a form of consumer-generated media in which his relationship to the advertiser is not inherently obvious, readers are unlikely to know that he has received the video game system free of charge in exchange for his review of the product, and given the value of the video game system, this fact likely would materially affect the credibility they attach to his endorsement. Accordingly, the blogger should clearly and conspicuously disclose that he received the gaming system free of charge.
I am going to write more shortly on these rules. We believe that ever more than before, Expo continues to act as the clearinghouse for the best way for consumers to engage in authentic, helpful and relevant product dialogue.
I’m maturing from blog infancy to blog adolescence by upgrading from a Blogger account to WordPress. It’s ugly, but I’m working with someone to make it prettier…
I actually have a > zero pagerank, so I am being dainty about how I complete the transfer. You can see that I’ve duped all my archive posts below.
Thanks for visiting, feel free to link to this site. All new posts will show up here.
Daphne
UPDATE: Transferring URLs…Google just put up this summer a way to notify them of the change of website address:
Amazon killed its Video Widget this morning. Sunsetting fully-working affiliate tools simply due to low usage cannot be a high priority for Amazon at this flush time. I would guess that it was closed down due to reasons other than low participant uptake. Sometimes, low-level tools are shut down because the number of complaints aren’t worth the fixes. When I wrote about the Video Widget in the Spring, a concern was the conflict between uploading a ‘review’ video and then making affiliate fees off it. It would have been possible to trash competitive products to promote your own. Alternatively, possibly people were taking advantage of a free hosting platform and uploading personal videos. Since you have to associate one product to each video, perhaps manufacturers objected to having their products associated with unscreened, irrelevant videos. Here’s one by me:
Another reason to sunset a working product would be if an improved, or conflicting product is due for launch. This might be the case since they’re allowing you to leave up your old Video Widgets. If I find other discussions about the closure, I’ll update this post.
The position that social media marketing is risky for brands is far from unfounded. The democratization of any medium is almost by definition messy and uncontrolled. That is a scary place for brands to be. But the smart brands know that it’s scarier to not be there at all.
We have been working with a number of those smart brands.We use three ingredients to ensure that everyone wins…our clients, our creators, and our consumers.
Start with a great product
We don’t work withF500 brands because they’re the easiest ones to get to. For a small company, they’re the hardest to get to. But we target working with F500 brands because they launch great products. They do a tremendous amount of work beforehand to ensure the success of a product. P&G spends $2 billion a year on 8,000 engineers. LG maintains 30research centers for $3 billion a year. Who wouldn’t want to test a product that has millions of dollars of R&D and months of consumer testing behind it? Expo has actually turned down a number of companies because we thought that the products were not high enough quality.
Don’t ask the bald guy about shampoo
Part of the power of social media marketing is that it is intensely personal. Sites should know so much more about their community than ever before. Companies that allow anonymous text postings, or encourage thin veils of member credentials are simply socially bankrupt. The more information your community shares with you about itself, the more you can tap into the appropriate, relevant social network for clients. A great product needs to be in the hands of the person it was designed for. Great brands design their products with a very in-depth consumer profile in mind. These profiles don’t just encompass age, gender, income, but also include things like buying habits, social activities, lifestyle choices, and family size. We have located, on behalf of our clients, consumers with a certain hair length, buyers of no-frills grocery products, people who watch a specific TV show, even women who are breastfeeding!
Reward an honest relationship
You started with a great product. You put it in the hands of the target consumer. What can go wrong? At this point, very little should go wrong. But, alas, companies out there have screwed it up anyway. A few thoughts on how to avoid the last few potholes on the way to buzz nirvana…
There should be no need to bias the consumer. If you feel a need to somehow inject incentive for positive reviews at this point, then something in step 1 and 2 isn’t working.
General review sites on retailers and elsewhere generate about 80% positive buzz. We will turn down clients expecting us to generate a 100% positive campaign. Trying to manipulate an unnatural result leads to disastrous choices.
Disclose until you can’t disclose anymore. Don’t just do this for FTC reasons…which are only there to protect the reader/viewer of the content. Disclose and require disclosure so the community of contributors knows that those are the rules you play by. Build a relationship with contributors where everything is out on the table. You will attract people who want to play by those rules. Those are the people that will strengthen your ability to guarantee a natural, authentic and honest result.
I see Google’s new filter, Search Options, as a very specific attempt by Google to own consumer word of mouth — that untethered sea of millions of voices speaking about products, experiences, brands. The Search Options that Google launched: Video, Forums, Review…are all currently the strongest forms of consumer expression. In evidence of their interest in commerce, the example in theirvideo demonstration of Google Search Options is a product search: “Powershot SD 750”.Based on the selection of filters available in “Show Options”, Google isobviously hoping to capture a larger share of product researchers by optimizing their search results. Let’s break down the first few critical Search Options that Google chose to launch.
Video: Well, there’s expotv.com, the largest and only video site dedicated to word of mouth video for consumers. Great content to surface in Search Options! And then there’s youtube, which could be characterized as the largest video platform dedicated to word of mouth video for anything. Unfortunately for users, youtube’s page rank of 9 will render this Search Option less helpful. Youtube’s product-tagged video will surface often, but the results will have a number of weaknesses for consumers looking for helpful product information. The two that we often point out are:
(i)the horrifically uneven quality, type and quantity of information that is presented from video to video
(ii)the inability to search effectively no matter how specific your search terms due to poor tagging by great videos, and great tagging by poor videos
However, if you’re Google and you own Youtube, then helping youtube surface even potentially relevant consumer video is a great way to monetize the content.
Forums: Why search forums? Aren’t they the sources that you most avoid when doing a search? Sorting through a bunch of moms talking about swine flu is not going to give you much serious information about the disease. But if the search is on products – forums become an authentic source of consumer enthusiast information. Unlike on Web 1.0, corporate poseursare now often outed immediately on forums. Hard-core enthusiasts take legendary status on forums as moderators, contributors, and consumer experts. The information on the best and biggest forums offer sincere,personal and authentic discussion by enthusiasts. Go to a Disney boardif you want to know the best rooms on the Disney Cruise ship, not Disney.com.
Reviews: I assume I don’t have to cover how reviews are relevant if Google wants to own word of mouth consumer search. The proliferation of text reviews (and even the proliferation of tools that allow sites to implement text reviews) make Google’s search of the resulting vast expanse of content invaluable. Amazon does a great job of sorting through its user reviews in order to spur conversion to sale. Why shouldn’t Google apply that same logic to ALL user reviews.
From Expo’s point of view, Google’s optimization of consumer word of mouth is a boon for content sites like ours. Expo will benefit from the care and attention Google is putting to format, content, and source of user generated product information. We think product researchers will undoubtedly benefit as well.
What’s next for Google Commerce:
Google’s already reached perfection taking both irrelevant and relevant content and attaching a commerce component via Google Adsense. What’s left? Price comparison is dominated by the engines like shopping.com and now it’s commoditized with APIs. Product selection search is dominated by Amazon and its vast marketplace of products. Google then tried inter-Amazon search through its “site search box“. While a smart move by Google, it’s a terrible user experience since Amazon does a much better job of searching its own site and tailoring it for the non-anonymous user.
My bet is on Local Commerce. Local commerce is one area that has yet to unlocked by online tools. My bet is Google will win that game against the brilliant start-ups out there trying to attack local dollars. Local cannot be attacked on a national scale (thus the different names), but GPS is allowing hyper targeting to become relevant to geo-targeting. By vectoring GPS, maps, and local search, Google has the winning combination of national services to synthesize local advertising. Remember, they don’t need to create the local content, just find the right person to deliver it to.
Woefully behind on tricking out our Youtube page with new utilities. Today, Youtube SEM.
1) You can now set up a text ad much like an adsense ad, and then buy keywords for placement of a link to promote a specific youtube video or video channel. The example on the right shows how I purchased the word “consumer reviews” and you can see my bid earned me first placement among…one bidder. The layout is integrated, with a video thumbnail and my text descriptor.
2) Obviously, the key is finding the right keywords that work for you. There are similar tools to adsense that will suggest related keywords to the ones you are targeting. I assume those are based on popular youtube search queries.
3) Youtube allows you to set a maximum bid price and a daily maximum budget. The interface allows you to see the average slot placement you earned based on your bid. You can change each keyword individually. Youtube serves google adsense results when there is no youtube bidder. In my small tests, it seems if there is at least 1 youtube bidder on a word,
youtube seems to displace the adsense module for the youtube bidder. My bids were very high, so it’s possible the unit is already be optimized to serve adsense or the youtube bidder based on which yields the most revenue. However, for strategic reasons, I would think they would favor heavily the youtube bidder. Such a weighting keeps the visitor within youtube, since the paid link goes to a youtube video or channel. That allows youtube to show effectiveness of the ad unit, and the ability to keep the user to monetize further.
The Youtube Promoted Videos is an interesting ability to get distribution for your video. The trouble for youtube will be finding users who have the ability to monetize their video or channel, or have rationalized some other reason to pay for viewers. The rates are relatively high…I’d heard the average is $1.00 CPC, although we have been experiencing significantly lower CPC than that for first slot placement on our keywords. (Obviously, it all depends on what words you’re going for.) I’ll update that range as we expand our buys.
More on the impact of these changes to commercial applications after I post about the Youtube Insights module next.
Clickz broke a great story about changes to youtube. Basically, youtube seems to be throwing in the towel on monetizing their brand of UGC. They’re creating a tabbed ‘ghetto’ for not only amateur videos like “Charlie Bit My Finger“, but also for semi-pro content as well (sorry semi-pro, you’re more semi than pro).
Between closing down the Google Adsense/Youtube units and now creating a monetizable player specifically for professional content, I think Youtube is taking a business plan stand. Their UGC, with billions of eyeballs, is pretty much unmonetizable. UGC (and copywrite infringements…and porn…), with its $470 million of loss for hosting and serving, may be the french fries that bring the search audience to youtube. But it’s the professional content where youtube is now betting to make its money.
Some changes I would expect? Search results will begin to favor professional content in the results. UGC, which is next to impossible to search productively anyway, will become subordinated to the professional results. If you search for “how to bake a cake” chances are you wouldn’t mind finding a Food TV segment, or Martha Stewart or anyone you know. Of course, you actually get “lfritz73″. And as charming as she is, I have no idea if she makes a good cake. Segregating the two will allow you to find all the copywrited clips you want…all legally if Youtube can get their syndication deals done with the majors.
Copywrite infringing materials will get taken down faster, or through a better process. With revenue at stake now, both youtube and copywrite holders (NBC, ESPN) will want to have their results found on the monetizable, “good” player, not the UGC ghetto tab. Previously, there was no economic incentive to takedown infringing content (and actually incentive to leave it up for the audience those clips attracted). Which leads to….
Professional publishers will be more liberal with what they put up online. If youtube is monetizing the content, and they are counting the eyeballs, and there’s a pretty player….well, voila, that’s kind of TV.
More and more eyeballs to broadband…less and less to the TV box. Watch out Comcast. The repeats and archives are now moving online. You know what’s next.
Most of you won’t be affected by this, since it seems very few people were using it. Google Adsense discontinued offering Youtube Video Units as part of their never-ending-search for youtube’s revenue model. As part of the program, Adsense users were able to find a youtube video, attach it to their Google Adsense account, and embed the ad-enabled video into their site. Then, they could sit back and let the Adsense for Video overlay money roll in while they slept. From an email they sent to Adsense account holders last week:
“After reviewing our AdSense video units feature, which allows you to show YouTube content and ads on your pages, we’ve found that it hasn’t had the impact we had hoped for. As a result, we’ve decided to retire this feature at the end of April so we can focus our resources on other opportunities to help publishers earn from their sites. “
What were the problems? We don’t really know, but let’s assume that Adsense publishers really did embed adsense-enabled youtube videos into their destinations. Here are some guesses as to why Youtube still might not have found success:
1) The ads were unable to correctly discern the context of the video in order to match relevant advertisers. Adsense works because of its unparalleled ability to contextually match an advertiser to related text content. Adsense for Video, however, is dependent on Google’s ability to read the tags and metadata attached to the video. The metadata for Youtube videos are created by the uploaders, which include things like “27309 1/9“. In that specific case, the video has no other metadata other than being in the “People and Blogs” category. Hard to create advertising relevancy with that level of information — even for Google. Therefore, not only could the viewer be negatively affected by irrelevant ads, but that leads to poor performance for the ad units.
2) The videos that people wanted to post don’t lend themselves to advertising. Many viral videos, as we know, are extreme, funny, or extremely funny. Most don’t lead the viewer to think, “Hmm…I would like to know more about a cheap plane ticket to Florida right now.” Even if Google was able to discern the context of the video through proper user-selected titling, tags and metadata, finding a relevant ad on the skateboarding cat is hard to do.
3) The age old problem: Branded advertisers want to know where their ad is showing up — not just on which embedded video, but on which embedding site. Advertisers on youtube video overlays often turn a blind eye to whether the video itself is appropriate content for their brand. If you pay by the click, sometimes you just care about the people who clicked, not the people who didn’t. However, in this program, the advertiser must also extend their ‘blind eye’ to include whether the embedding site is appropriate. If Youtube tries to sell CPM video deals with branded advertisers as opposed to applying only CPC affiliates, then the importance of knowing where the video is being played rises. Branded sponsors have too much at risk to tie themselves to unknown destinations, once they get over being tied to unknown video content.
We like the Google Adsense for Video service that places relevant Adsense overlays on video. For informational video content attached to rich metadata, there is no reason that GAFV shouldn’t be as successful for Google Adsense in generating revenue for video publishers. At Expo, we experience very rich RPM from GAFV and high CTR due to the relevance of the ads to our video content. A Krups coffeemaker video review will display a “Krups at Macys” overlay every time. We wouldn’t be able to do that without Google Adsense, but the bar for user gen video is as high as any other content to properly leverage Adsense’s strengths…metadata, quality and relevance of the content still matter.
UPDATE: If you’re confused about all these monetization attempts on the part of Youtube, here is a clarifying page Adsense put up to help discern them all
If you upload a video on amazon, there’s an insteresting app that will let you make referral money off it. Gets into a murky area if the video you’re uploading is a product review or claims to be unbiased, but it’s a cool tool regardless.
A friend of mine uploaded a product review to Amazon under my associates account, and I added a bunch of products to it. Some were irrelevant, but fun to add. Very simple. I like it. Lots of possibilities if Amazon can hone in on what video they’re looking for people to upload, and what behavior they want to reward.
Julie Ruvolo, who pops up everywhere on the digital scene all at the same time, has joined a startup that went alpha this month. www.solvate.com
The concept revolves around creating an uber-database covering answers to common customer service issues that people individually need to solve hundreds of times each day. Solvate allows frustrated customers to not have to re-invent the wheel each time one of us has a problem someone else had before. For example, something like “How can I return my cable box back to Time Warner so I can cancel my cable subscription” probably takes us 45 minutes working through TWC’s byzantine call centers before we find out our options. And even then, we probably only find the option that one customer service rep knows, which I bet would be a different option if we were connected to another rep on another day. Meanwhile, I know hundreds of other people had to have gone through this…why don’t I know what they know?
Solvate plans to standardize the ‘answers’ to these questions, so that Solvate agents (and I assume the online public) can provide fast solutions to the second client who asks the same question.
Solvate charges by the man-hour to find the solution, and is currently offering your first hour of agent time for free. So, I tried it out by asking about the best online site to find a deal for a Disney Cruise. I know that Disney itself doesn’t offer many deals directly to cruisers, but they do offer them to agents (who then can pass on the deals to cruisers). Solvate did work, I did get a list of places from “Ryan C”, my Solvate agent, that offered consistent specials and weren’t shaky fly-by-night travel sites. I’m not sure if it saved me time, since it was just an online search. But, I would guess that if my problem involved customer service reps, and phone calls, and escalations, and specific departments, Solvate would save me time and aggravation. And if I was the lucky second person that asked a question, I am sure that the pain of the first person would benefit me. I think the trick for Solvate is to hone in on the problems people would be willing to pay Solvate to solve. ate.
Good luck, Julie and Solvate. I’ll call you back when I need to cancel my cable subscription so I can get FiOS.
Co-founder and CEO of Expo, video commerce solution based in New York City. Former CFO of Oxygen Media and member of founding team. Entrepreneur, wife, mom.
The FTC guidelines for endorsements have been published and can be found here. There are three main sections of interest to bloggers, and the marketers who support their voice.
Most of you won’t be affected by this, since it seems very few people were using it. Google Adsense discontinued offering Youtube Video Units as part of their never-ending-search for youtube’s revenue model. As part of the program, Adsense users were able to find a youtube video, attach it to their Google Adsense account, and embed the ad-enabled video into their site. Then, they could sit back and let the Adsense for Video overlay money roll in while they slept. From an email they sent to Adsense account holders last week:
