Transcript
Robert Freud (0:00)
Foreign.
Sarah Levenger (0:05)
Welcome to today's show. Welcome back to Brave Different Brands. I'm Sarah Levenger. I'm joined by a really special guest today, somebody that I've actually been following religiously, like silently, oddly stalking you for a minute on Twitter just because everything you post is so interesting and it's very different from what we typically see on D2C Twitter in general. So yeah. Today's guest, Robert Freud, you have quite the history with specifically law in particular when it comes to dd. So you spent your career, it sounds like helping DTC E commerce brands kind of navigate that risky overlap between some of the stuff that I teach, which is like the psychological persuasive kind of aside, and then advertising law. So it sounds like you did a lot of stuff with like nine figure brands, startups you were defending companies from FTC investigations. I mean, I looked into kind of like your about page just to see what you've been doing in the last couple years. You kind of seem like you're the go to guy for those kind of mapping between clever marketing ideas and like actual real world legal stances. So welcome to the show. I'm excited to chat today.
Robert Freud (1:06)
This will be interesting. Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm excited too.
Sarah Levenger (1:10)
Okay, so we can dive into your background a little bit because I think your background is fascinating. But I want to start with talking a little bit about compliance when it comes to D2C and marketing in particular because a lot of us marketers came into the business as like, what would you call it? We just learned it by doing it. Nobody really taught us how to do E commerce. We just kind of learned over the course of like 10 years taking courses from other people who were two to three years ahead of us. I've never seen anybody that took a course in advertising law though, and I don't think I've ever seen an advertising law course. So let's talk a little bit about D2C and compliance. Do you have like a good best practice, like three different things that you've seen that's like these are the big things you gotta know.
Robert Freud (1:52)
I mean it's hard to pick three specific things, but I think I can give sort of an overview. So yeah, most of my what I focus on is helping consumer brands and ad agencies ideally avoid finding themselves in the kinds of lawsuits that I used to litigate in the first half of my career. So for the first six and a half years I was practicing, I was at a big law firm called Greenberg Trarig and I was litigating And a lot of the cases that I was exposed to and that I ended up focusing my attention towards were defending businesses against consumer class actions. And in California, a lot of those consumer class actions have to do with false advertising. So as time went on, I realized that area of the law, advertising in particular, was the most interesting to me of the areas I was exposed to. So I, I tried to focus on it. And in 2019, I had realized that staying at a big firm and litigating at a firm like that is not what I wanted to do forever for a number of reasons. And I left to start my own practice and I wanted to move away from litigating so much and towards helping clients understand how to avoid those situations. So most of what I do you could think of is like consulting, compliance, consulting type work. And I also handle related transactional work. Like if you're hiring an agency and need a services agreement or the other way around, or if you're working with influencers or affiliates or any third party vendor that relates to your business. That's the sort of stuff that I'll, I'll work on too. Interesting. So to answer your question, like where do you, where do you start with best practices for advertising?
