Consumer advocacy group Commercial Alert has asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate buzz marketers for deception. In its letter, it identified Procter & Gamble’s as a possible culprit.
Commercial Alert sent a letter yesterday asking the FTC to investigate whether buzz marketers violate federal law prohibiting deceptive advertising.
The letter asks the FTC to review 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.”
The non-profit group also asked the FTC to investigate Proctor & Gamble’s Tremor, which it said has enlisted about 250,000 teenagers in its buzz marketing sales force.
The letter read in part: “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.”
Commercial Alert requested that the FTC require all brand ambassadors to disclose their relationship to the brand they are pitching.
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