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FTC Regulations Mildly Affect Product Review Posts, Might Harshly Affect Spammers

Mon, 2009-10-05 15:23 — figleaf

Heads up via Adam B of Daily Kos for bloggers who do product reviews or endorsements (emphasis his.)

Today, the Federal Trade Commission formally enacted new rules regarding the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising (PDF), extending these requirements regarding disclosures of conflicts of interest (last revised in 1980) to the Internet.

...

The revised Guides also add new examples to illustrate the long standing principle that “material connections” (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers – connections that consumers would not expect – must be disclosed. These examples address what constitutes an endorsement when the message is conveyed by bloggers or other “word-of-mouth” marketers. The revised Guides specify that while decisions will be reached on a case-by-case basis, the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service. Likewise, if a company refers in an advertisement to the findings of a research organization that conducted research sponsored by the company, the advertisement must disclose the connection between the advertiser and the research organization. And a paid endorsement – like any other advertisement – is deceptive if it makes false or misleading claims.

Read the quote in context here.

Examples of where disclosure is required include not just bloggers who get free products (for sex bloggers that would include free vibrators, publications, and pay-site memberships) but also

  • Amateur consumer-review site bloggers when they review stuff they’ve received for free
  • Employees, owners, and sales reps who post or comment about their products on other people’s websites

I don’t think this will much affect the reviewing bloggers I read since pretty much all of them are quite conscientious about disclosing their affiliations. It’s something to keep in mind though if you’re considering reviewing promotional materials.

One question that doesn’t seem to be addressed is be whether this could be used as another tool against comment spammers who, after all, are representing publications, websites, and products (where the product may be malware) and who typically disguise their affiliations in order to lure you to follow their links. One would certainly hope so. Conspiracy to subvert or flout FTC regulations can result in surprisingly large fines and long sentences.

Cool Condom Ad

Thu, 2009-02-05 14:13 — figleaf

The Pleasurist** of The Principle of Pleasure has a great rundown on condom commercials from around the world.

Before talking about condoms yesterday, I was searching around online and happened to stumble across some really hilarious condom adverts from all across the world. Apparently lots of cultures can easily find the humor in condoms.

See all the ads embedded here.

I love this one!

It’s informative, erotic, responsible, encouraging, romantic, grown up, and manly without the inevitable overtones of nervousness or macho you see in… (via Feministe) a Superbowl ad for a target=”_blank” href=“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAoEfSHkc9U&eurl=http://www.feministe.us/blog&feature=player_embedded”>corn chips!

The Problem With The American Apparel Fashion Ads Isn't That They're From American Apparel

Fri, 2008-11-21 15:18 — figleaf

Debauchette says

Since I’m pressed for time and since American Apparel’s sexy sexed-up ads are a revived topic of conversation here and elsewhere, I’m going to leave you with my favorite AA ad, which can be found on the back of S Magazine

Read the quote, and see the no-safer-for-work-than-many-glamour-ads ad itself here.

The AA ad, if you’re not inclined to visit the link, shows a Photoshop-skinny woman in only a pair of gray men’s “y-front” underwear lying between the legs of an equally slender but hairy-legged man. She’s looking up at the camera while, it looks like, pulling aside his pair of gray men’s “y-front” underwear before giving him a lick.

I’m inclined to agree with Debauchette that one walks into a bit of a trap for objecting to this specific ad, because unless one objects to the whole principle of glamour/fashion ads, one’s argument must be that the implied sexualization of commodities isn’t supposed to be so overt.

It’s prudish libertine maxim that using sex to sell anything is problematic on multiple levels ranging from basic insecurity about one’s own products to perpetuating karl-marx-style alienation of sex away from its-self-for-itself and towards sex a medium of exchange.

If you’re not willing to condemn all such ads then you’re sort of obliged to admit that’s a good one.

—-

We’ll leave for another day everything else one could unpack from such an ad for not-even-white-whitie-tightie men’s briefs!

Update: In case anyone wonders my pale endorsement of AAs ads are not an endorsement of the owner’s, um, evidently disgraceful workplace conduct, nor of his discreditable defenses. The closest to that I’d come would be to say that he appears to practice what his industry preaches.

Why Not Go Straight For the Spoon?

Thu, 2008-05-08 08:55 — figleaf

Still working my way back through older comments I ran into a great one from TLT in response to this post about housework as the traditionally “missing” displacement fetish for women. TLT says

I recently figured out that this is exactly what I find revolting about a TV ad for Betty Crocker Warm Delights.

Yes, even the name sounds sexual. Yet, Warm Delights are these…things that you open, add water to, cook in the microwave for a few minutes, and get what ostensibly is a dessert.

As far as I’m concerned, the only time dessert comes out of the microwave is if you put a slice of cold pie in there for 20 seconds before you put the ice cream on it, but that’s something else altogether.

The commercial shows women (and only women) eating these things, often in a bed and/or in pajamas, moaning and sighing, eyes closed. Some even lick the spoons and forks they’re eating with. I think one even licks the bowl it’s in.

It all seems to suggest that what you (woman with misplaced, confused, repressed sexual desire) will get out of this box is sexual pleasure, not some overpriced combination of chemicals that probably tastes only vaguely of chocolate.(Chocolate being another one of those things that is supposed to drive women just crazy)

It’s hard to catalog the variations of stereotypes and nonsense that ad perpetuates. Let’s see…there’s “Women don’t really want, need or like sex. They just want dessert…and probably jewelry.” Or, how about “You don’t really need/want/deserve sex. Just eat this cake and shut up. You’ll feel better about spending your nights in bed alone.” Or, my favorite “It’s just too much work to cook something yummy for yourself, or even to go to a bakery to get it. Just put this in the microwave, it’s just as good.”

Ick. Just ick.

She said it here.

What seems really troubling about that ad (and, you know, that’s sort of a theme in a lot of ads and not just that one) is what an empty displacement it is. Once upon a time, maybe, one could have argued there was some sort of overall benefit for women sublimating their sexual expression into nurturing family with food. Or something. But the women in these ads are almost alway depicted as single or, occasionally, partnered but alone (as in you see a darkened sleeping form next to the awake woman who’s slurping cookie dough or something.) And so they’re taking what might have once been a nominally beneficial sublimation and shifting the “nurturing indulgence” back on the woman herself… which is kind of nuts in the way only sublimation (or, long as we’re batting around Freud, the “return of the repressed”) can be nuts: she’s alone or single and so she’s expressing sexuality by… feeding herself!

I suppose you can’t expect Betty Crocker Corp., which sells only sweets, to try and sell anything else. But… but… but… &%#@#%~!

It’s just *so “no-sex” class! Why not “sell” the woman on giving direct pleasure? Or using the spoon to give herself real orgasms?** Or if that’s too racy or presumptuous how about just eating the flipping dessert?

(For the record they throw different kinds of sublimation at men so I can’t comment directly. There was a great Saturday Night Live or Mad sketch doing the YouTube rounds a while ago about a man having a maximal shampoo-ad experience in the shower that I’d like to link to. I think it ends with him asleep against the shower door? Anyone have a link? For that matter, let me know about any other similar uselessly-sublimating ads you’ve got YouTube links to. Update: From Bunny here’s one link: MadTV “Herbal Elements”, and from JFPBookworm here’s a Will Ferrell/SNL take on the same concept. .)

[** Does anyone do that any more? When I was in high-school a heck of a lot of girls in our informal sex-ed circle swore by masturbating with the backs of soup- or tablespoons. —fl]

Medium Messages for Women and Men

Sat, 2008-02-23 01:14 — figleaf

So the other day in class we watched the third revision of social theorist Jean Killbourne’s classic lecture, Killing Us Softly III, Advertising’s Image of Women, on the pernicious, generally degrading messages advertising presents to and about women, shows a young supermodel-type bride exuberantly kissing an elegantly white-tuxedo’d, visibly verging on senescence geriatric man at what, from the muted background, appears to be the culmination of a wedding.

The approximate tagline: “She’s marrying him for his money. Like he cares!”

Killbourne correctly points out one of the overt and covert subtexts of the ad: the dangled reward for bending one’s self to conform to the exacting standards of beauty the more one is likely to marry a millionaire who’ll indulge your every (financial) whim, with the even less savory messages about men, money, women, beauty and it’s impact on heterosexual sex and marriage. Eww!

I’d like to add to, rather than subtract from, Killbourne’s point about the impact of the implications about the beauty imperative on women in that ad (and countless others like it) by pointing briefly to the implications about the worthiness imperative on men who might see that ad: without money or other accomplishments you’re nothing…

...and more to the point, without money or other accomplishments you’re not going to get that girl because she’s going to marry that rich geriatric instead of you.

The point, again, isn’t that ads like the ones Killbourne points to adversely influence women — that’s a complete given, a case she makes extremely clear. What’s overlooked is that those ads instruct men too. They teach women what they’re supposed to look for, to sacrifice to achieve, to measure themselves against and… they also teach men what we’re supposed to strive for as well, what we’re supposed to prove ourselves worthy in order to get. That’s all bad enough — obviously two rats in a squirrel wheel is not an improvement over only one. What’s particularly bad, however, is that those ads teach men is how to use women to measure our achievement. In other words if there’s a continuum for men that ranges from young man who’s to shy to ask anyone out because he has no car, to the old man in the ad who’s affluent enough to “have” women clamoring after him, then at each stage of that progression women in media are used, objectified, buried face down and legs up, stripped of humanity in favor of their utility as mile markers.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, good or bad, to like to dress up or to have a nice car. Not at all, at all. But the ads we see in medium after medium push way past fun and towards a totally false “survival of the fittest” mentality where, we’re supposed to believe, only the hottest woman and the worthiest men will be worth hooking up with and everyone else must settle for “second” best. When, in fact, beauty and worthiness aren’t maximum values but fairly low threshholds to be crossed, and past that threshhold real people begin to be way, way more influenced by, oh, say, love and romance, compatibility out of and in bed, ability to communicate, and all the other countless qualities this course is helping us scratch the surface of.

In other words what I hope is that next time we watch Killbourne’s older films, or open Rolling Stone or Vogue or GQ or Maxim we’ll swallow back our bile at the frankly abusive, commodifying, objectifying use of women… and at the same time whisper a bitter curse at the message they’re simultaneously sending to men.

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