Quickbooks Affiliate Disclosure: FTC Compliance or Advertising?
Compliance with the new Federal Trade Commission (FTC) guidelines (effective December 1, 2009) is a scramble for both Internet entrepreneurs and large online companies. For Internet marketers who sell multiple products, I’ve created affiliate compensation disclosures that can be used regardless of what is being sold. These documents are part of Website Legal Forms Generator v. 2.0.
However, it appears that bigger companies are taking a proactive stance by requiring affiliates to place special banners specifically targeted to their products on the affiliate sites. Intuit’s QuickBooks Affiliate program now requires the banner shown to the left. Here are the instructions that came with it.
Please be aware of the recent FTC guidelines about product endorsements. Affiliates, bloggers, tweeters, and endorsers are now required to disclose their relationship with Intuit. Please let your audience know that you are an affiliate of Intuit. Please make these changes ASAP. We will be auditing landing pages next week. For more information, you can visit the FTC website: http://ftc.gov/multimedia/video/business/endorsement-guides.shtm
ACTION ITEM:
We have an “Authorized QuickBooks Affiliate” badge for you to post on your site. The badge should be placed somewhere prominent on your site to inform your audience.
Although I applaud the intent, these instructions are too vague. First, QuickBooks leaves it to your discretion where to place the banner. If you’re blogging, does this mean that you’re supposed to put it in every post that mentions QuickBooks? That would be reasonable.
My concern is that the intent of the banner is to encourage affiliates to put the banner in the sidebar, i.e. less about compliance and more about taking up valuable space with the QuickBooks banner. If every affiliate program operator requires a special banner to be placed in a sidebar regardless of post content, there won’t be enough room to fit all of the “badges.”
Quickbooks should allow a generic Affiliate Compensation Disclosure to suffice. There’s really no need to brand the material connection with the Quickbooks brand…except extra exposure for Quickbooks by using the badge as an advertisement. Note that nothing in the FTC guidelines requires the disclosure to state the name of the product or even the material connection details. The guidelines require disclosure of the connection’s existence so that the reader knows that the content may be biased/tainted rather than an independent review of the product’s merits.
About the Author
With an advanced international law degree from Georgetown University and more than 15 years of real world legal experience, Attorney Mike Young is President of the Internet Ethics Council and creator of Website Legal Forms Generator software. He helps entrepreneurs protect and grow their businesses online.
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I think you’re right on with this and, in fact, if that was the entirety of the Intuit instruction, not only is it vague, it’s doesn’t even border along the lines of educating their affiliates. I believe this should be the merchant’s obligation to do that, not just refer affiliates to the FTC’s website and expect them to fair on their own.
It’s like going from the vague Intuit environment to a completely legal environment where there’s further confusion with legal speak and more vagueness that may not necessarily answer the concern of the affiliate.
The more control a merchant has over their affiliate program and the specificity of how to apply things with clarity will only boost the confidence and effectiveness of the sales force.
Not only is this a poor and selfish act to preserve the company’s branding, but it lacks total aid and support to those folks that are advertising and sending traffic to Intuit (the affiliates).
I believe there are those affiliate programs that are truly awesome and shine above the rest because they actually educate, inform, and specifically train their affiliates how to sell responsibly, especially with these new regulations coming into play and things becoming a lot more form on the net.
My question is where exactly is the Intuit affiliate manager in all of this?
Jim,
With a company the size of Intuit, my guess is the “affiliate manager” is probably three levels of bureaucracy that report to a vice president of marketing and make decisions by committee so that no one is responsible if anything goes wrong. The bigger issue is how this went out the door without in-house counsel knowing about it. And if in-house counsel did sign off on it, someone’s head should roll.
Best wishes,
-Mike