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Jared Bryant has experience helping brands, from startups to top Fortune 500 companies, to navigate complex state, federal, and local laws governing various marketing, advertising, promotions, consumer protection, copyright, trademark, and right-of-publicity legal issues.

The FDA and FTC recently issued joint warning letters to seven sellers of products that claimed to treat or prevent “Novel Coronavirus Disease 2019,” known as COVID-19.

According to FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn, “The FDA considers the sale and promotion of fraudulent COVID-19 products to be a threat to the public health.”  FTC Chairman Joe

On December 20, 2019 the FTC sued FleetCor Technologies, Inc. and its CEO, Ronald Clarke, for alleged misleading advertising practices, claiming FleetCor had collected at least $200 Million dollars in hidden fees from fuel card service customers. According to the Complaint, FleetCor’s ads promised customers that their fuel card service had no setup, transaction, or membership fees. But the FTC alleges that FleetCor charged customers those very fees, merely renamed as “Account Administration Fees,” “Program Fees,” “High Credit Risk Account Fees,” “Convenience Network and Out of Network Fees,” “Minimum Program Administration Fees,” and “Late Fees and Interest and Finance Charges.” 
Continue Reading FTC Sues FleetCor for Hidden Fee and other Deceptive Advertising Practices

On the heels of three FTC consent decrees involving the Consumer Review Fairness Act (CRFA), the FTC has brought two more CRFA-related complaints against home-rental businesses.

Broadly speaking, the CRFA, which became effective in 2017, makes it unlawful for a business to prohibit its customers from being able to post negative reviews online. As predicted, we are seeing an increase in FTC enforcement of the CRFA in 2019.
Continue Reading FTC Enforcement of the CRFA is Underway

In 2016, UrthBox, Inc., a subscription-based service sending monthly snack boxes to customers, had only nine reviews on the Better Business Bureau’s website and all of them were negative. By 2017 UrthBox had 695 BBB reviews, 612 of which were positive.

According to a complaint from the FTC however, the cascade of positive reviews was the result of an incentivized review program. Specifically, in 2017 UrthBox offered to send customers an incentive (a free snack box) in exchange for submitting a positive review for UrthBox on the BBB website. However, the BBB requires customers submitting reviews to affirm they have not been provided any incentive from the business they are reviewing. UrthBox also offered incentives for customers who posted about their products on Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and Facebook but, according to the FTC, UrthBox did not monitor or provide instructions to consumers on how to comply with the FTC’s Guidelines on endorsement disclosures. Those Guidelines put the onus on businesses to make sure that customers posting reviews sufficiently disclose any compensation received from the business.
Continue Reading Incentivized Review and Free Trial Practices Draw the Ire of the FTC

The NAD recently recommended that Perdue Farms, Inc. modify or discontinue certain TV and YouTube ads about Perdue’s “Harvestland Organic” chicken. Tyson Foods, Inc. challenged the Perdue ads before the NAD, arguing that they broadly communicated that all of Perdue’s chickens are “happy” and raised “organically” (free-range, non-GMO, 100% vegetarian-fed, and raised without antibiotics). Perdue responded that ads only communicated claims about Perdue’s “Harvestland Organic” sub-brand. The NAD, however, viewed the overall “net impression” conveyed by the ads and found that they communicated broad claims about all of Perdue’s chickens, in part because the ads contained many visual and audio references to the primary Perdue brand, but only fleeting visual references to the Harvestland Organic logo. Perdue announced that it will appeal the NAD’s decision.
Continue Reading National Advertising Division Recommends that Perdue Farms Discontinue Ads About Happy, Organic Chickens