SEN. SUSAN COLLINS (R-ME) may refine her tough new sweepstakes bill with an eye toward making it more friendly to direct marketers. But critical elements, including a restriction on telling consumers they have already won a contest, will remain intact, according to Kirk Walder, a Collins staffer.
“We think we can produce tough legislation, but fair legislation,” Walder said, speaking before the Direct Marketing Association’s Government Affairs Conference in Washington, DC last month. He predicted that the bill, introduced by Collins in March, would be marked up by the Senate sometime in May.
Focus has been on the sweepstakes standards the bill creates, but the legislation also addresses tightening restrictions on government look-alike mailings and gives the U.S. Postal Service stronger enforcement power against deceptive mailings through beefed-up subpoena and injunctive authority.
The sweepstakes portion will not be so detailed as to mandate the point size of the type used in the piece, but the contest’s sponsor would have to be made clear, as would the fact that no purchase is necessary to enter. And recipients could not be told they had won if they hadn’t. “The rules must be put in a fashion easy to find, read and understand,” Walder said.
Walder agreed that Collins’ bill targets the same basic elements as existing deceptive advertising laws, but added, “We felt it was necessary to put it in fairly specific terms.”
In his remarks opening the conference, DMA President H. Robert Wientzen said that the DMA “could support the establishment of national standards for sweepstakes promotions as long as they don’t prescribe advertising copy and placement that would run afoul of the First Amendment.”
