You better be what you say you are...
Brian Fuller came out of the blocks today with what I consider devastatingly good news. Apparently the Federal Trade Commission has taken a look at the state of the media and decided that both bloggers and companies are going to be libel for claims made in blogs and websites when they are not covered in traditional media.
In the past, companies could use the "buyer beware" defense because it was possible, in the days of a vibrant media, to do enough research to know when companies were ringing the BS bell. But now, companies and bloggers will have to prove their statements unless they can show that there was objective coverage available to the market. If they can't and the product doesn't work as stated, the customer can sue.
Can you imagine what this is going to do to news releases?
Hi Lou,
ReplyDeleteAbout what it will do to company news releases. I don't know if this will really change anything. Most press releases don't contain enough info (just un-backed up facts) that I'm not sure there will be enough for a lawsuit.
I'd be more worried about the technical info on the web sites than the press releases. Most companies put up their data sheets on their web sites - does this mean they can be sued for data sheet "mistakes."
Oh, another excuse to pay the lawyers...
Paula
In another lifetime, I worked for a large company that required all news releases to go through legal before they went out. That's not unusual now, but then it was. The reason was that the company made a claim about one of their products that was proved in a lawsuit to be wrong, because a miniscule competitor that worked out of a garage actually had products that disproved the big company's claims. It cost the big company millions so the policy was put into effect.
ReplyDeleteHowever, since that time, the FTC has held that private companies were exempt from that requirement because it was easier for a customer to check things out than it was for the private company. This ruling essentially says that since the customer can no longer do effective due diligence -- even over the web -- that all companies regardless of status now have the responsibility to check out their hyperbole.
So unless a company has documentation proving that its product claims are true across the board, they are open for a lawsuit. In other words, a little EDA company that claims the "fastest" whatever, and there is some unknown competitor in Romania whose product is faster, they are in trouble.
How do you deal with this? You will need comprehensive market research, or you will have to significantly scale back the hyperbole.
Paula (again) hits a point: I did some work a while ago for a company, ghosting a technical contributed article. It was sourced, at their suggestion, from ample material on their site. When we went through the review process, some of the claims in the piece were distributed by internal folks. "We can't say that. The product doesn't do X..." etc. Yet all those points came directly from their own published material.
ReplyDeleteIn fairness, products change over time. But it points up a big challenge for companies today: Content that became fishwrap after a time because it was printed is evergreen online. Misleading or just plain old and outdate information is just waiting to be found in a search.
And I have yet to come across an organization that has a structure to deal with this problem.
Lou, another great post with a particularly pithy kicker!
I started to get nervous about this, thinking it had to do with free speech, but felt better after reading it is about advertising. I pray that someone doesn't think it will be a good idea to extend it further.
ReplyDelete