FTC to viral marketers: Fess up

The Federal Trade Commission has issued a staff opinion recommending that marketers who use word-of-mouth or viral advertising be required to disclose the fact, according to an article in the Washington Post.

Word-of-mouth advertising has been around for decades. But the rise of the Web and social media has brought , who haven't missed noticing the viral nature of much Web content--that or the multiple links on a MySpace page may really be the work of an advertising campaign.

"We wanted to make clear...if you're being paid, you should disclose that," Mary K. Engle, FTC associate director for advertising practices, told the paper.

Blog community response:

"True word of mouth efforts don't come about as the result of any specific campaign, but rather an effort to make a good product or service that people believe in which they'd want to talk about, and making it easier for them to do so. In other words, focus on the product and then get the hell out of the way. If you're trying to program the message as part of a campaign, it's no longer word of mouth marketing."
--Techdirt

"The industry which may not as obvious (at least to the technosphere) is the affiliate marketing industry which is responsible for moving billions of dollars worth of e-commerce by itself. While there has been much talk about the necessity of disclosure with outfits that directly affect blogs, there has not been a similar discussion within affiliate marketing - probably because it predates PayPerPost and its ilk by...oh, seven or eight years."
--Deep Jive Interests

"Markets may be 'conversations,' but if you can't tell who's carrying on the conversation, that's now a finable offense. This is also a bucket of cold water on the use of social networks like MySpace and Facebook to engineer 'viral' product recommendations and other such word-of-mouth marketing schemes."
--Publishing 2.0