The Use of Endorsements & Testimonials By Internet Marketers

We've all seen sales pages with a string of testimonials from satisfied customers praising the product or service being sold.
In the internet marketing arena, you see testimonials from customers bragging about the amount of money they made or weight they lost.
These types of claims can get you into trouble with the FTC? Endorsements and testimonials are an area the FTC carefully monitors.
Terminology
Most lay people would probably say that a "testimonial" is an opinion of a product or service made by an "ordinary" person who uses the product or service, while an "endorsement" is an opinion, usually a compensated opinion, made by a celebrity of some sort.
That is the common understanding of the terms, but the FTC has said that it will treat endorsements and testimonials identically when it comes to enforcement, so you as a marketer need to be clear on how the FTC defines these terms.
Here's the FTC's definition:

... an endorsement means any advertising message (including verbal statements, demonstrations, or depictions of the name, signature, likeness or other identifying personal characteristics of an individual or the name or seal of an organization) that consumers are likely to believe reflects the opinions, beliefs, findings, or experiences of a party other than the sponsoring advertiser, even if the views expressed by that party are identical to those of the sponsoring advertiser. The party whose opinions, beliefs, findings, or experience the message appears to reflect will be called the endorser and may be an individual, group, or institution.

That definition is a little long-winded, but basically it comes down to the fact that an endorsement means an opinion expressed in an advertisement by someone other than the advertiser.
What Does the FTC Require?
Here are the FTC requirements:

• The endorsement must be truthful and not misleading to the consumer
• The endorsement must clearly and conspicuously disclose the generally expected results from the use of the product or service
• The advertisement must disclose any connection between the advertiser and the endorser.

In order to meet these requirements the following conditions must be met:

• If the advertisement states or implies that the endorser uses the product the endorser must be an actual user of the product and the advertiser should be able to document that fact.
• Testimonials claiming specific results will be interpreted (by the FTC) to represent what other consumers will typically achieve. That being the case, the advertiser must possess adequate substantiation of that representation.
• If the advertiser does not have substantiation of the claim, then the ad must "clearly and conspicuously" disclose what the generally expected results for a typical consumer are expected to be.

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