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Oct 19, 2009 -- New standards affecting celebrity endorsements, blogs

Celebrity endorsers are being held to new standards that should help consumers avoid being swayed when hearing a pitch from a familiar face or voice.

The new standards affect actors, radio talk show hosts, DJs and bloggers, among others.

When it comes to blogs, many of these sites are just hidden advertising sites. Bloggers will now be required to disclose whether or not they receive compensation for their posts.

In addition, actors, talk show hosts and DJs will be required to have working knowledge of what they're pitching. In essence, they've got to get very familiar with the product. That's going to trip up a lot of people in Clark's line of business!

There are monetary fines for running afoul of the new laws. The fines will be prohibitively large for bloggers. But they'll be relatively small for talk show hosts and actors -- relative to their usual high level of income.

So the bloggers will go out of business if they run afoul of the new laws. But it will just be more of a blow to the reputation for actors, hosts, DJs and other celebrities.

Remember, Clark does not do endorsements. An endorsement is where somebody pays you to say something. It's always been his policy for 22 years in radio and 18 years in TV to not do commercials.

He believes it's essential with his format that you know he's speaking about a product or service because he believes in it, not because he's paid to do so.

Unfortunately, Clark won't be able to answer any questions submitted via commenting. If you have a question, please try posting it to our message boards.

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What others are saying

  • Another gov't over-reach
    Of course, this will only be enforceable to bloggers within the US. The gov't is going to spend more money enforcing this, than it will save. Another poor decision by the pols, that they can go on talk shows and brag about.
  • JJ and z: are you really that ignorant?
    See that text at the bottom of the page? You know that "Cox Media" gibberish? That's who controls Clark's "advertisements." He doesn't personally control the website or radio station. What he's talking about is actual endorsements of products and services. Like when Wade Boggs says Just for Men is awesome... and then gets paid for it. You people are unreal!
  • Higher Standard
    Speaking of advertisers, it is quite entertaining hearing Clark vilify the companies offering to see your credit report only to be followed by a freecreditreport.com commercial.
  • Higher Standard
    Clark, if you are so righteous, you should adopt Consumer Reports' higher standard of "no advertisement". Sometimes, an advertiser on your website is quite suspect.
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