A story from Ad Age in the US highlights an area where the UK is moving ahead of America. From May 26th it will become illegal for marketers and their agencies to seed positive references about their own products without making it clear the source of the comment.
I have been sceptical toward the codes of conduct developed by organizations within the industry. While its great they have tried to evolve commonsense best practises and propagate good behaviour, self-policing isn't the best way.
Clarity and the threat of law is by far the best way of keeping marketers honest, and that's all of us.
Most of our activity in this area is within customer advocacy or customer reference programs, which by default are about getting your customers to say it for you, so I don't think we've got any skeletons. It'll be interesting to see if any of the agencies and brands espousing this new law as a positive step, need to slip quietly out back and tweak the About section in some of their campaigns.
Weirdly this is all because of the EU, which has taken time out from legislating on the standard angle of deviation permissible in a banana, to do something useful.
Tags: word of mouth, customer advocacy, marketing law, AdAge