🔒Keep your advertising honest

Truth-in-advertising is a cornerstone of Better Business Bureau’s mission to build marketplace trust.

We have decades of experience keeping a watchful eye on advertisements to identify cases of misleading, deceptive or untruthful advertising. We call this process advertising review.

BBB monitors a wide range of advertisements, including internet, print, television and radio, as well as company websites based on our Code of Advertising.

This code aims to help businesses avoid creating advertisements and websites with insincere offers to sell a product or claims that are misleading, untrue, deceptive, fraudulent or falsely disparaging of competitors.

I’ll share with you an overview of some of the standards we use to evaluate advertisement.

To start with, advertisements should be truthful and sincere about offers.

It’s possible for an advertisement to be misleading even though each sentence, when separately considered, is literally true.

Misrepresentation also happens when facts are withheld or omitted.

Better Business Bureau pays careful attention to how companies promote their prices.

When a company compares prices to its own former selling price, current price of others, list prices, wholesale prices or to items which are imperfect, it needs to make sure consumers have all the necessary information to make an informed purchase.

When comparing its prices to those of competitors, a business must be clear in the description and certain about the comparison.

BBB scrutinizes how businesses describe their sales.

The unqualified term, “Sale” may be used in advertising only if there is a significant reduction from the product or service’s usual and customary price, and the sale is for a limited period of time.

BBB will look deeper into superlative claims like “#1 car sales in the city” because they must be substantiated by the company.

And any testimonials and endorsements should not include claims a company cannot make and support on its own.

Better Business Bureau works with companies when an advertising review uncovers a problem.

We inform the company and encourage it to voluntarily substantiate or modify claims of the advertisement in question.

We also invite consumers to alert us about misleading advertising they might encounter.

Anyone can report a questionable ad in real time using the online tool AdTruth.

But if you’re vigilant about ways to build trust with your customers, don’t wait for BBB to get involved in your advertising.

Measure your advertising creative and website copy against our Code of Advertising and make adjustments accordingly.

Those businesses that would like help with this can call on BBB to review advertisement and/or website copy before publication.

We’re happy to provide this service and offer suggestions if something is out of sync.