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The FTC’s Next Target: Are Direct Response Advertisers About to Get Wrecked? | Marketing on Trial
00:30:51
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- [00:00]
A
So we've seen a fundamental shift in the FTC for pretty much since its creation. It's always been a law enforcement agency. So it regulated the economy for unfair and deceptive trade practices by really bringing litigation enforcement actions. And then business was on notice because these cases would work their way through the adjudicative system and businesses would, you know, have to learn from that.
- [00:21]
B
We didn't hear about as many people getting in trouble 15 years ago, 20 years ago, as we do today. We certainly didn't hear as many people being on like house arrest and actual jail time. Kind of walk me through that, like, how did we go from the wild west to quite regulated? And everybody knows that people do get in trouble.
- [00:41]
A
I mean, I think that.
- [00:46]
B
Welcome to another episode of Marketing on Trial, a spin off of Special Ops podcast where you bring actionable steps to entrepreneurs. Today we're going to be talking about how direct responses on notice, the ftc, it isn't just watching influencers or shady supplement brands anymore. They're now turning their focus to mainstream performance marketers. That means your funnels, your urgent copy, your income claims, your testimonials, all of it. In this episode, Ryan Poteet, Gordon Reese and I will deliver no holds barred breakdown of what's about to change and why many of the strategies that scaled brands to 7, 8 and even 9 figures could be ruled as deceptive marketing in 2025 standards. I'm going to bring a behind the scenes look at what's happening in real media buying teams and Ryan brings the legal perspective from the current FTC enforcement trends and rulemaking proposals. If your funnels are filled with guarantees, limited time offers and so called social proof, you need to hear this episode from start to finish because by the end of it you'll know exactly what is still legal and what could get you right. So Ryan, we've gone from indirect response, we've gone from direct response, mail, infomercials, newspaper ads. I'm not exactly going in order here. BSLs, webinars, all sorts of progression has happened. Tell me over the last 10 years what's happened with regulations compliance. When I started in this industry, there was certainly compliance, there were certainly rules. I don't think that they were as well known or as well enforced as they are now. And I think a lot of things have been a lot more dialed in by government agencies. But I still think a lot of people have a lot of misconceptions. And so as we do, I'd like to run through that with you. So tell me where, where have we gone in the last 10 years?
- [02:39]
A
So we've seen a fundamental shift in the FTC for pretty much since its creation. It's always been a law enforcement agency. So it regulated the economy for unfair and deceptive trade practices by really bringing litigation enforcement actions. And then business was on notice because these cases would work their way through the adjudicative system and businesses would, you know, have to learn from that. The FTC went before the Supreme Court, lost a lot of its remedial authority and fast forward, it quickly became a regulatory agency. So it could issue regulations defining what was a violation of what it would deem as an unfair and deceptive trade practice and as a result could get civil penalties for. So no longer are we reading tea leaves and trying to guess what the agency is thinking right now. Just like other regulatory agencies, we have very clear lines of what the FTC thinks is lawful and unlawful. So that's really been the shift that we've seen over the last five to 10 years.
- [03:29]
B
We didn't hear about as many people getting in trouble 15 years ago, 20 years ago, as we do today. We certainly didn't hear as many people being on like house arrest and actual jail time. Kind of walk me through that, like how did we go from the wild west to quite regulated? And everybody knows that people do get in trouble.
- [03:49]
A
I mean I think the, the Internet definitely made information get a lot faster. But even before that, I mean a lot of the people learn about things through newspaper and so you would hear like the massive headlines, but the kind of the run of the mill enforcement actions, the small offenders, I mean there wasn't really a great place for the public to go and get that information. I mean pre the Internet after.
- [04:07]
B
Right. Where did you go if you were selling things in infomercials to know what the FTC said you couldn't, couldn't do? I didn't even think of that.
- [04:14]
A
I mean, well, that's the thing. I mean you were kind of either going to Title 16 of the CFR or calling a lawyer. I mean it really, the access to information literally wasn't readily available.
- [04:24]
B
And so we are in the information age, right?
- [04:26]
A
Yeah. And so now there's a press release for everything. The FTC is very. Flashy is not the right word, but they are very proud of their consumer protection efforts and they issue a press release. And so this press releases say, you know, they have collected X amount of money from people and this is what they were doing and everybody should be on notice. This is what's prohibited but even more so now we have hardcore regulations that say, you know, this is unlawful. This is what the FTC would expect. And there's a bunch of informal guidance as well. But really before the Internet age, it was a little bit more of the Wild West. And the only thing that most marketers would've seen is the, oh, wow, this was a major headline in the Washington Post or, or something like that. So everything is much more condensed and centralized. So consumer, not consumers, but marketers have access to this information, I think is a higher expectation that people are going to comply.
- [05:06]
B
Makes a lot of sense. I want to run through some things and some of it we've talked about on other episodes, so we'll point back to that. But I want to run through some things because what is changing in 2025? Right. What does the FTC want to see? So let's start with income, health and testimonial claims. What are my requirements? We have another podcast that we talk about some of the things regarding testimonials, but I want to dive a little bit deep here. What are my requirements?
- [05:35]
A
Sure. So let's start with income claims. If you are advertising that someone, if you buy my product, can make a million dollars. Right. So you need to have.
- [05:44]
B
I don't make that much money, but I can teach you how. That's most of them, by the way.
- [05:48]
A
Exactly. So you need to have written proof somewhere that person actually made a million dollars. And not only that, if you're going to tout that testimonial or that endorsement of your product, you need to show that that's typical. And so what does that mean? Like if you teach a business coaching.
- [06:02]
B
What about the disclaimer? This may not.
- [06:04]
A
Not anymore. Not anymore.
- [06:06]
B
And let me just finish, I want people to hear it. This may not be typical. Right. Results or atypical results.
- [06:12]
A
No.
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B
Now that's not an okay thing to do anymore. And a lot of people don't know this.
- [06:17]
A
No. There's an affirmative obligation to actually say what is typical. I mean, you will be in FTC enforcement actions where you need to come up and say, okay, you were saying that this person made a thousand dollars.
- [06:26]
B
Or whatever the number is, make $10,000 this month.
- [06:29]
A
I want to see what your students have made over, you know, a certain period of time, whether it's stock trading or business coaching or whatever, whatever you're selling. If you're saying that people will buy my product, I'm going to teach you or show to make more money, you need to be able to substantiate that you need to show what is typical. Not just like hey, these people are making a million dollars or hey, you know, there's all these Lambos and Ferraris and yachts and things like that. I mean if I hope that everybody's that successful, but very, very few are.
- [06:57]
B
So let's say just because I want to be like really clear, what would the FTC say is typical results? 50% of your students, 75%, 90%, like what would you feel comfortable?
- [07:10]
A
It's going to be the average consumer experience. So I'd say about like so you.
- [07:12]
B
Just take everybody and average it out.
- [07:14]
A
I would average. Well if you're going to take one person, it needs to actually be that person's experience using the product. But you know, if, if you look.
- [07:21]
B
In like you're talking about testimony. I'm talking about income claims. Well, we started with income claims income.
- [07:26]
A
So like, you know, Ryan, I bought your course and you're touting. Ryan is, hey, I bought your course. Ryan made a million dollars last year. You would want to show that. I would say at least half of the, or at least maybe the median student population is making a million dollars. You know, that would be the typical results. If the vast majority of your students are only making like a thousand bucks, the FTC is going to argue, well, it's deceptive to go out there and say, well this person's making a million dollars. No reasonable consumer would buy this course and expect to make a million dollars. There's nothing wrong with touting results and you should be able to. I mean attorneys do it all the time. It's like, of course there's always carve outs for attorneys. But like, and we'll say, you know, past success is not indicative of, you know, future cases and things like that. But you know, you should be able to go out there and you can like look at our highest performing students. You need to just put people on notice that these are going to be atypical and affirmatively disclose that they're not typical. Like sure, you shouldn't expect this.
- [08:15]
B
Here's my top 10 totally clients results.
- [08:19]
A
You also need to be able to back up what the average consumer.
- [08:22]
B
We're going to be. Yeah, yeah, we'll get to that part. So let's go to health now.
- [08:26]
A
Okay. I think you know, health is definitely going to be or health products are definitely going to be the highest substantiation requirements. You need company.
- [08:33]
B
We talk, we actually talk about, and we'll continue to talk about this because we need to really beat it through.
- [08:38]
A
People, but competent, reliable scientific evidence. What does that mean? It's really what the experts in that field says that it is. And from the FTC's perspective, if you are selling a health product like a dietary supplement, you need randomized clinical trials on your individual product. That's what the FTC is going to say. We'll get into debate about whether or not they can require that or not. But that's what the FTC is looking for, for and expect.
- [09:00]
B
On health claims. On health claims, we do talk in another episode about, like, serving your customers. So go back and listen to that. For sure. But okay, so testimonial claims.
- [09:09]
A
So Brass Tax. You can't use a test.
- [09:12]
B
This is the one I'm going to spend the most time on because I. There's some really interesting rules around this, but please.
- [09:18]
A
Well, you can't use a testimonial to say something that you otherwise couldn't say. So if you're selling a dietary supplement, you can't use them to make a.
- [09:24]
B
You can lose £10 this week.
- [09:26]
A
Yeah. Or this dietary supplement is going to cure cancer or something like that. The advertiser is going, I took the.
- [09:32]
B
Supplement and I walk again.
- [09:33]
A
Yeah, look at me, I'm great.
- [09:34]
B
Yeah.
- [09:35]
A
The advertiser is going to be held responsible for what their testimonials say. Okay, so that's on the substance. And then you need to disclose material connections, which we talk about another podcast.
- [09:44]
B
Okay, I love all this, but let's talk now about your requirements and responsibility to show evidence. And so if I may, we have an entire SOP for testimonials, for reviews that we use, any claims that we use when we survey our customers and how we package it. And so I'd love to run through that with you. I just want to kind of run through what I do. And then you can correct anything that you would be like, hey, if. If you were my client. You're definitely your client. But if you were my client, I would want you to do it this way. So if we have a claim like the top, and we have this for one of our clients who has a coaching type program, our top five members all ROI'd 10 times within 30 days on their membership investment. That's 100% true. We asked them, not only did they give us a video testimonial that I have in a, like, little Google Drive, I just keep it in a Google Drive, but I have a consent form from them saying that I can use it. That consent form also says that what they are Stating is true and accurate. And then we also had them fill out this little piece of paper because I really did want to catch anybody who was lying. What was your income prior and what was your income today? Believe it or not, people won't even think properly and they'll just quickly. And then the math won't. Math. Right. So. And we've kept all that in a folder for our health claims. We absolutely don't do what the FTC requires or says that they require. Those tests are astronomically expensive. You would spend more money on those studies than you'd make and you'd spend more time and energy than you could possibly split test to make enough money. So the way that we've done it in the past, and we talk about this on another podcast, is through surveys. We survey our customers. 92% of customers who took this joint support product felt more mobility after three months of continuous use. But I just wanted. So the second part of that is we kept all of the data, but not just the data points. We kept every single email, even the emails that were not answered. Because in the disclosure part of that, when we said we surveyed 10,000 people of which X responded to our question of which. And so we kept all of that evidence, including the emails that went unanswered. Go ahead.
- [11:56]
A
Yeah. Just the caveat to that being like you need to have some. Especially for health products. You need some sort of study.
- [12:02]
B
Financial too, I think. Financial biz, op. All of it. Like everything.
- [12:07]
A
Every everything. But just like using the dietary supplement example, like surveys, some at some point.
- [12:12]
B
Would be like Ryan said, I only need it for health. Everything, everything.
- [12:16]
A
Or I could use it. Survey alone is going to be enough. No, like you need to have. You need to be able to point to studies and say you need to.
- [12:22]
B
Be able to point to studies, at.
- [12:24]
A
Least ingredient studies, human ingredient studies, where they're the route of administrative rat studies aren't okay. No. Otherwise you're going to find yourself in a very difficult position when you're talking to the FTC and they're asking for all your claim substantiation and it's this massive race to put all this stuff together. And then all of a sudden you.
- [12:41]
B
Realize you don't have it all.
- [12:43]
A
You were selling a white label product and you were sold a bill of goods that this product doesn't do anything. So you need something more than just consumer reviews.
- [12:50]
B
We call it BS in a bowl.
- [12:52]
A
But no, you need to be able to point to something and do not rely just exclusively on consumer surveys.
- [12:57]
B
For sure. I want to move on. But before I do it, is there anything that you would add to the income, health testimonial claims and the evidentiary part of making sure that your business. I'm sure you could talk for hours on this, but high level, anything you'd add to that?
- [13:11]
A
Yeah, I mean, if you're making income claims and you don't have the backup for it, you're going to have to develop it. So doing consumer surveys, I mean, that is a great way. I mean, you need to be able to get that proof on hand so you can actually establish what's typical. And surveys is a great way to do that.
- [13:24]
B
Make sure you listen to our previous podcast where we talk about it because we actually go through what exactly you need to do. And you can't go and pick, hear me now, because marketers, man, they'll find a way to assure you need to survey a proper pool. We go through how to do that. You can't go through and say the last 10 people that called in and said that they lost weight and they hit their goal, hey, survey them. And then let's put that survey out. There are ways you do it and we go over that, but go ahead, continue.
- [13:51]
A
Yeah, no, I mean, if you find yourself in a position that you need to rely on surveys, there are definitely ways to do it. You need to get a representative sample of your consumer base. It needs to be preferably most of them. But sometimes that can be difficult. But you can't just go out there and cherry pick.
- [14:07]
B
You can do it pretty easily. You can survey from a time period, you can survey from a traffic source, you can survey from a geographical location. There are lots of different ways you can do it, particularly if your ads are running to that geographical location.
- [14:20]
A
Yes. With the caveat being if that geographical location has better.
- [14:24]
B
Again, other podcasts, but if the geographical location is, hey, we sell 85% of our products go to the United States. So we surveyed 2,000 people that purchased from us in the United States. So I do want to move on. That's, that's really all good stuff to know. Urgency, scarcity, inclusivity is great if it's real, but if it's not, it can.
- [14:46]
A
Get you, get you in trouble.
- [14:48]
B
Find jail. What?
- [14:50]
A
I don't think it's going to be the thing that sends you to jail. I don't think that that alone is going to get you a civil penalty. That said, I mean, it's just, it.
- [14:56]
B
Could be the thing that gets their eyes on you.
- [14:57]
A
Yeah, I mean, it's just one more thing. I mean none. Whether it's an advertising claim or a marketing practice, very rarely is a is it going to be one, just one thing. But when you are creating this false sense of urgency, you're creating this like scarcity that really doesn't exist and you're getting consumers to buy something like buy into this idea that, well, they might not get it right now or they might have to spend more money in the future. Something that you're creating this market that doesn't exist and that's deceptive and it's material to purchasing decisions. And if it's material to purchasing decisions, then the FTC is going to look that and say, I don't like it. And the FTC uses the word or the phrase dark patterns. I mean anything that you're doing to kind of just frame a narrative around a product or an offer to where you're trying to convince people buy something that they otherwise wouldn't, you know, not good sales, not good ad copy, but just these marketing practices that create this false market, that's where you're going to run into some trouble.
- [15:46]
B
I will say we did speak about this in another podcast and we talked about some pretty creative ways to do it legally, compliantly and also not scamming.
- [15:54]
A
Yeah, I mean like, you know, the pop up with incentives not creating a false market, but like an incentive like hey, if you buy now, we'll give you an additional 15% off or a.
- [16:03]
B
T shirt or whatever.
- [16:04]
A
Something like.
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B
Whatever. Yeah, something extra.
- [16:07]
A
Exactly. You're not.
- [16:07]
B
Don't leave. I want you to try my product. I believe you'll love it. Awesome. Thank you, Ryan. So again we have another podcast that we did on influencer marketing and so when it comes to influencers and affiliates, we actually the majority of what we talk about is disclosures. But I want to talk more about how to manage influencers and affiliates from an operational standpoint on this one. So there's multiple things. As a business owner, we're responsible for what anyone says to sell our product, whether it comes from us, an affiliate, an influencer or review site. Doesn't matter if we're using deceptive practices or we're not disclosing payment of an influencer. We're the ones that's ultimately going to be held responsible. So for us we actually run spyware. I very respectfully disagree, but I heard you say like sometimes you get so big are using so many influencers that you don't have time to go and review everything. I just really feel like that's nonsense. If you're so, in my opinion, if you're so big you're capable of using that many influencers, you can have some QA and QC people that are running spyware on your products and you know every single piece of ad copy reel that's made, every email, everything that's going on on your product.
- [17:25]
A
No, absolutely. I mean, you're going to understand the tech side of that better. I mean, you need an affiliate monitoring program or an influencer monitoring program, whatever that ultimately looks like. It needs to be more than like, oh, somebody complained about this influencer out there, this affiliate marketer, or they're ripping off my trademark or something like that. I mean, you need to actively be policing your affiliates and influencers.
- [17:44]
B
You have to have good contracts, good.
- [17:45]
A
Ios, good contracts, good iOS, good rule sets.
- [17:48]
B
That is explanative. Here is my ad copy that you can use. Here's my display ads that you can use. Here's my email swipes you can use. If you want to use something different, we are very, very happy to allow that. However, it must go through an approval process. And then also when you utilize language like should we determine that you have not followed the specifications in this contract surrounding messaging disclaimers like whatever it is, depending whether it's affiliate or influencer, you just basically write in there you don't owe them any money for any of the sales. And instantly they'll make sure that they always get approval on every single sale or any single copy or reel that they put out.
- [18:30]
A
Well, and just in so much of that goes to. And this would be an entirely separate discussion, but you know, it goes to bargaining power. I mean, if you go to a big affiliate network, you're not going to be able to redline their agreement. You know, but if you are, that's not true. I mean, you can. They're less receptive because usually I'm the one saying, no, you can't do that or we're not going to accept it.
- [18:45]
B
It's all you rep, you represent. So I can see that. I could see like something like clickbank as a whole or Digistore as a whole. I could see something like that. Most ad networks that you want to put parameters that are compliant. Yes, parameters. And affiliate networks that you want to put compliant parameters. I've actually never worked with, with an affiliate that didn't want to move forward because of my red lines.
- [19:09]
A
Red lines. Their master services agreement.
- [19:11]
B
Yeah, okay, yeah. Digistore I'm sure would tell me to go F off. Right. But I Also don't have to accept every affiliate. I can approve each affiliate from digistore and work it out with the affiliate directly. Right. Like, I'm trying to think of. I don't want to say any names, but I'm trying to think of. There was one time, there was one affiliate, one time they changed their name and sold that. Like, really was. Just did not want to work with me because of the red lines. They didn't want to. I wasn't big enough to send to their attorney. And then when we started doing 7 million a month, they kept begging me to sell my product. And I was already so cannibalized at that point, I had no interest in them. But I don't want to get stuck on this one point. But I wouldn't say roll over to a big affiliate that's not going to be compliant. Most of them have that. They need to have the compliance components already in their master service agreement.
- [19:58]
A
Yeah, no, and I'm not talking about the.
- [20:00]
B
And if you pay for the attorney, they usually aren't too crappy about it.
- [20:03]
A
Giving them guidelines of what they can say. Yes, absolutely. I was talking about more of the contractual provisions about, you know, what the network would be responsible for, their policing obligations and things like that.
- [20:14]
B
Like the policing obligations are always yours.
- [20:17]
A
Yeah. And the withholding payment and things like that.
- [20:19]
B
So fair enough. I think these are important things to know and understand. So I now I want to kind of go back to the affiliate side because there's a lot of. And we haven't spent a lot of time on this podcast yet talking about affiliates. And there's a lot of practices that go on that instantly, like, my spidey senses are like, nay, nay. So, hey, can I get a direct cart? They want to create their own sales page. The amount of people that I know will just give it and not even ask any questions.
- [20:48]
A
Lose. You lose absolutely all control.
- [20:50]
B
All control. And again, it's okay. As a matter of fact, I have no problem with someone who wants to write my sales page for me. If they're getting better numbers than I'm getting, which I'm going to have data for because I'm paying them on it. Right. I've got the affiliate links. I can see how many clicks they get, how many conversions they get. They do better than me. I can go take the messaging and rip the messaging and put it in my own beat my own control. But you need to have full sight of what they're saying and what they're doing, because I didn't know they did it. You gave the analogy a couple of weeks ago. I'm speeding in a car and there's a bunch of other cars and I.
- [21:22]
A
Get, oh, if everybody's. Yeah, if everybody's doing it, it's not a defense. You're still breaking the law.
- [21:26]
B
Right. So whether there's 20 cars doing 80 miles an hour or one, you're getting the same ticket and you have no defense. So making sure you understand what your affiliates are doing and having conversations with them on. And then I want to just talk briefly and quickly about promotions, affiliate promotions or contests where you're really pushing people to get a lot of sales because they'll get a high payout. Those are the times that you want to watch the absolute closest, not just for compliance, but for fraud compliance in your merchant accounts. Because if I can make an extra $10,000 or like there's one ridiculous contest where they gave away a $10,000 hoverboard to the top affiliate. But if I can win something, money monetarily or some big prize, I've even seen a car one time. If you got X amount of sales with X amount of dollars and you are the highest, you get a car. But you don't know what people are going to do. So you really, really need to be really careful because contests already put your mids in J. You're getting a massive influx of sales and your chargebacks and refunds go to sales to chargeback ratio and the chargebacks that refunds happen after the contest and so you're back down to normal revenue. So having those dips is always scary anyway. But making sure that you have an affiliate monitoring program, an influencer monitoring program where you're watching what they're posting, you're watching what they're emailing, you're watching their messaging, and you're making sure that it's compliant for the ftc. I mean, this podcast is really about the ftc, but for your merchant accounts, the fda, the whole bag, right? So I'd love to talk about what advertisers, direct response marketers, e commerce brands. You and I just launched a brand that we plan on having for a long time and we're selling info products on health, on wellness, on finance. I don't think either of us would ever do this, but health, finance, wealth and biz op, we're going to set some parameters, some operational parameters to make sure that the company's compliant. Give me the four or five things that you would make sure that me as the operator went in and made sure we had employees for our business.
- [23:24]
A
Yeah, I mean number one is going to be claim substantiation. If you're going to say something about the product, you actually need to have something to back it up. And it needs to not just back up the claim but it needs to be sufficient in the eyes of whether it's competent, reliable scientific evidence. So it's, you know, the scientists and doctors in the field or if more general income claims, you know what the FTC would be looking for. So that'd be number one. I'd also be looking to make sure that anything that you're sending selling on continuity, definitely not misrepresenting anything about the.
- [23:49]
B
Product because now we're, we haven't even touched on here. So the subscription side, you're making sure that your subscriptions are well understood by the average layman person who is going through your funnel.
- [23:59]
A
That's, you know, exactly. And then now given new regulations that we are not misrepresenting any characteristic of the product because there's going to be civil penalty liability for that as well. So getting your subscription billing disclosures and just overall house and order, that's to going be a really big one I think. Lastly, you know, this isn't really so much FTC related but it's consumer classic. Get your terms of sale in terms your privacy policy in order. Make sure you have an enforceable click wrap on the checkout page and make sure that the whatever mechanism you're getting on that checkout page there's agreement between, you know, when it says I agree to or by clicking Buy now I agree to businesses terms of sale and privacy policy that the consent mechanism or that button matches the language up above. So there's no disconnect. So you know you're not using, you know the call to action is there's no disconnect between those two otherwise you're going to get into some e contracting issues and that's where you end up in a class action when you thought you were covered.
- [24:46]
B
Sure, I'm going to do mine now. Launch this business. Some things that I'm going to put in place is number one a QA system for reviewing ad copy for deceptive and exaggerated claims. And so number one, I don't want that person doing that review to have any type of like performance based bonuses, any type of like need for responsibility for marketing KPIs. I want that to be probably someone in operations who has a clear understanding of what those terms mean and do not get any type of bonus off of the revenue or profits that come into the business. People get greedy, man. So that's number one. Number two, I want to make sure we're updating disclaimers to meet FTC language requirements. Those change regularly. And so like you've done my terms and conditions for my website. If you don't have a cadence where there's like every 18 months or 24 months, you're just going to your attorney and saying, hey, these TNCs that you wrote for me, here's what's changed in my business. You know, what's changed with the FTC and any new regulations or standards that they're putting out. Do we need to review these or not? And that's, that's really important, I think for most people. And then really reviewing your fake urgency or any scarcity or any exclusivity. We only let 20 people in and there's 45 people that you sold to that day. Like, it's really important to you can find ways to not be scamming liar and use your marketing brain, if you're such a great marketer, to be able to say and create that for people without breaking the law. Media buyers. Media buyers is a big one for me. I would have a lot of SOPs and a lot of regulation over the people that are running my ads for Facebook, pbc, whatever I'm running ads to. I want to have a ton of operational control because they have KPIs that they have to meet in order to keep their jobs. They're not going to be able to go spend a whole bunch of money. So number one, no media buyer ever didn't sell and kept their job. That just doesn't work that way way because they're also expensive. Number two, no media buyer ever didn't make a gazillion changes that was making you money over the course of a month. Like there's so many things, they put 25 ad sets out. What's the one that wins? Now let me get 25 that look just like that and see which one wins. And I'm gonna get 25 over and over and over again. And it all happens so quickly that there's no way that even your QA process, like for influencers that I was talking about would really be doable if you're doing, you know, if you're at a high traffic amount and trying to create speed of implementation. So I would have a lot of SOPs around that and I would have very, very strict, you get fired immediately if I catch you screwing up rules in my company. That were well understood and known, I would make sure that they took some training. And I fully mean this. Whether it be a course that someone, we should create this course, by the way. Whether it be a course right after I say we would never do this. But truth in advertising, deceptive practices, all the components around the ftc, you have these media buyers that are coming in that people train, that never get that. And then it's an ad that screws someone because they were so adamant and they're copywriter new and they're copywriter new and their copywriter new but their frickin ad guy didn't.
- [28:03]
A
Yeah, I mean it goes back to the SOP point. You need to have an SOP in place that defines how do you get a new claim for a product. And that needs to be memorialized.
- [28:10]
B
But it's not, it's not even just the claim component. Like there's so many things that can happen in the course of an ad.
- [28:16]
A
No, no, no, no. What I'm just saying is like that then feeds into the overall. Like when you're talking about providing training to the copywriters and the media buying team, I mean it's like it's very client business specific. I mean we were talking about in another podcast about risk and where this business wants to be. It's going to be very tailored on where that business wants to fall on that risk spectrum.
- [28:32]
B
Right. But again, step one, got to train the people that are creating the ads. They don't know what they don't know. And so how many times have you seen this ad? Click here to lose 30 pounds in 30 days. I mean you see that some daily.
- [28:43]
A
Mail all the time, right?
- [28:44]
B
Do you want to know that the person that has created that ad probably just studied other people's ads? Because you can go into the back of Facebook and kind of see what's working for people. Go to your competitors and you just kind of figure out what's working. If you continue to run ad for three months, that's probably working for you. So what am I going to do?
- [29:01]
A
Keep doing it.
- [29:01]
B
I'm going to mimic the ad. But if I don't teach my guy when he's going and doing that kind of thing, that's what they teach them is how to go find the ads that are working and to mimic them, that's perfectly okay. But they don't teach them the side that says just because it's working doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. So that education component on the people who are creating my ads and creating my media buying, I think is so important. The last thing that I would do is I would have a very strict rule set around spyware on monitoring affiliates and influencers and a whole process team. It might be one person. It could be one person in the Philippines for, you know, very little money. Might be a team of 12, depending on the size of my business. I've literally had from one person. It was in Jamaica. One person in Jamaica when we were 15 million and when we got to be 100 million, it was. We had 32 people that was doing nothing but watching and reading emails and they had all been through training to understand what the red flags were to push it to me. So that's what I would do. That's me. Any final things before I close this out?
- [30:02]
A
No, I think you summed it up well.
- [30:03]
B
You summed it up. You did. I just talked about operational things because you shared. Scared me enough. If you enjoyed watching this episode, we've enjoyed making it for you. Go ahead and like and subscribe so you can get notified whenever we put out a new episode. If you head over to www.special ops podcast.com Sign up for our visionary vault. We have tons of tools and courses and today Ryan and I co wrote the direct response ad compliance guide very specifically for your media buyers. Like we just kind of battle royale a little bit about the importance of it, but I believe the importance of is really huge and I know Ryan does too. So we created that for you. You can pass that along to the people who are writing your ads, to the people who are posting your ads, and even to the graphic designers that are creating your ads. Because visuals are important too. Thank you so much for joining us and see you next.