The Federal Trade Commission can order an advertiser to halt a deceptive ad campaign

advertising fraud, misleading representation of goods or services conveyed through false or fraudulent claims or statements that are promoted by a business or other advertising agent. A statement or representation in an advertisement may also be false or fraudulent when it constitutes a half-truth. According to Section 15 of the Federal Trade Commission Act of the United States, deceptive advertisements are those that are “misleading in material respect.” This has been interpreted by the courts to mean that the deceptive advertisement must affect the purchasing decisions of the customer. All forms of fraudulent advertising or abusive advertising are prohibited, as are those leading to errors in the choice of the goods or services that could affect the interests and rights of the consumer.

Corporations have long used fraudulent claims, as well as exaggerated claims, or puffery, to promote their products. In the United States the roots of the tremendous growth in advertising that took place after the Civil War were laid down over centuries of evolution in Western market places. Ethical issues regarding advertising were seldom raised, because advertising was considered merely a matter of announcing the availability of products. Even then, however, manufacturers devised and implemented skillful and boastful advertising to sell potentially harmful or bad products. By the end of the 19th century, abuses in advertising flourished in the United States and in Europe, along with consumers’ suspicions about advertised food. Food regulation, not advertising regulation, was introduced to deal with the problem in the second half of the 19th century.

In the United States, heightened attention to advertising’s credibility in the first decade of the 20th century foreshadowed the appearance around 1911 of an energetic truth-in-advertising movement, which initiated legislation and established organizations to combat dishonest business advertising. However, the criminal nature of the sanction, the inclusion of requirements of intent, materiality, and other restrictive elements, and the failure to provide administrative machinery, for enforcement severely limited the effectiveness of these statutes in suppressing false or misleading advertising. More generally, the advertising industry’s desire for self-regulation meant that prosecutions were infrequent and convictions rarer still. Most complaints were resolved through private negotiations.

Regulation

Federal and state laws in the United States and the establishment of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) accompanied this self-regulation. In 1914 the Federal Trade Commission Act, which states that false advertising is a form of unfair and deceptive commerce, went into effect. Under the act, the term false advertising extends well beyond untrue advertisements. It also includes advertisements that make representations that the advertiser has no reasonable basis to claim, even if the representations turn out to be true. An example would be an advertisement for a vehicle that states that the vehicle uses less gasoline than any comparable vehicle. The advertiser would have committed false advertising if it had no reasonable basis to support the truth of this claim (such as through comparative tests), even if it turned out to be true.

Under the law, the government does not need to prove the deceptive intentions at an administrative hearing or in court. The fact that it had a deceptive quality is sufficient. If the advertisement is deceptive in nature, the defendant faces legal problems even if he or she has the best intentions. The fact that the person did not know that the information was false is irrelevant. Determining whether or not a statement is deceptive, however, is a much more complex process, because one must not only examine the nature of the statement but also the potential effect on the customer. An example involves Anacin, a brand of aspirin. In the late 1970s the maker of Anacin ran advertisements claiming that clinical tests showed that Anacin delivered the same headache relief as the leading pain-relief prescription medicine. The advertisement did not mention that aspirin itself was the leading pain medicine. The FTC determined that the advertisement was misleading, implying that Anacin was more effective than aspirin when, in fact, Anacin was really just aspirin.