Email marketing is generally considered one of the most effective advertising strategies for businesses, but did you know that around 77% of consumers prefer receiving emails as well? In Sarah Cloutier’s “119 Facts You Don’t Know About Email Marketing,” the article’s infographic lays out statistics on everything from the open rate of personalized emails to the reasons why consumers choose to unsubscribe.
If you’re already taking advantage of an affiliate marketing program for your business, you know the benefits this strategy can bring in terms of lead generation and customer acquisition, while maintaining control over the cost per acquisition to ensure a highly cost-effective initiative. Another benefit is that affiliate programs can be leveraged across virtually every digital marketing channel. However, not every advertiser takes full advantage of each channel for various reasons. Email marketing is one channel that not every advertiser chooses to include in their affiliate marketing strategies. This may be due to the complexity in setting up an effective and compliant program in the email channel, which can be more involved than setting up a search affiliate program. Despite the effort, email affiliate programs have a long history of delivering outstanding results for decades and if you select the right partners to assist with the program, it can be more straightforward than you might think.
Why Email?
Despite the annual predictions about the impending death of email, the channel has never been more popular with consumers. As of 2019, there were estimated to be nearly 4 billion active email users worldwide. That number is predicted to continue growing in the years ahead. But, it’s not just about a huge potential audience. Email marketing also delivers results. When added to an existing affiliate marketing program, email will typically deliver incremental volume in leads or sales as the channel engages with different audiences. Lead quality and the consistency of the traffic also typically deliver high marks for advertisers.
There are numerous benefits to incorporating an email affiliate program in your marketing strategy.
Cost-Effectiveness
You likely already know that a properly managed affiliate marketing program is cost-effective. Email fits right into the mix, partly because the cost of running email campaigns is comparatively low. This is one reason that email continues to deliver such outstanding return-on-investment for many email marketers (reported to be as high as $42 for every $1 spent). This has made email an appealing channel for affiliate marketers over the years. But, like any marketing channel, email requires experience and expertise in order to drive the best results, which an affiliate program can deliver consistently.
Because of the infrastructure built into the email ecosystem, it is one of the easiest channels to track and effectively measure performance, and this transfers easily into the affiliate marketing arena through affiliate performance tracking platforms and networks. This is advantageous both for email marketers and advertisers, as it makes email a consistently popular and effective marketing channel for customer acquisition that can be easily leveraged in an affiliate program.
Incremental Audience Exposure
Adding the email channel to your affiliate marketing program is likely to add incremental audience exposure, above and beyond your current channels. Reaching a larger audience of targeted prospects is always a key aspect of growing an affiliate program focused on customer acquisition. Email can also help grow your audience more quickly than many other marketing channels, as email marketers can quickly ramp up their efforts to promote a new campaign to a potentially very large audience, depending on the size of their database.
What about Compliance?
Advertisers and marketers around the world have become more focused on compliance with laws and regulations around data privacy and how that translates into different marketing channels and strategies. Because the email marketing industry in the U.S. has been functioning under a set of established laws and guidelines since 2003 (when the CAN-SPAM Act was passed), affiliate networks, performance agencies, and email marketers themselves are typically already well-versed in setting up and running compliant campaigns, including the collection and processing of opt-outs and then ensuring that all affiliates honor those requests in the appropriate time frame. The ecosystem is well-defined, with key technology platforms easily integrated into an affiliate program, helping to ensure highly compliant campaigns from the inception of a new email affiliate program.
If you haven’t already added email marketing to your affiliate marketing programs, 2020 would be a good time to consider testing the channel and adding a new tool to your customer acquisition strategy.
Social media is an undeniable asset to modern marketing campaigns, providing brands with direct access to prospective customers as well as offering up a cavalcade of creative ways to promote products and sell services.
However, with hundreds of billions of emails being sent every 24 hours, it would be wrong to write off this more traditional digital marketing solution as irrelevant in the social media age. Indeed there are some ways in which email marketing actually outdoes social platforms from a marketing perspective, and here are just a handful of these key benefits it has to offer.
The biggest downside of social media marketing is the immense difficulty that comes with proving you are getting a good return on your investment. There are so many variables and so much fragmentation that it is hard to trace a sale back to a social media post to demonstrate its effectiveness.
This is not the case with email marketing, because it is a more mature strategy and there are tangible ways to track the impact that campaigns have and link open to and clicks to conversions, especially through transactional emails.
Studies have consistently shown that email marketing is the way to go if you optimise your ROI, not just in comparison with social media marketing but also paid search ads. This is worth remembering when choosing an email API that may have the potential to improve your email marketing capabilities.
Although social media is pitched as being the best place to engage with customers today, it has its limits, especially when it comes to keeping existing customers onboard.
Conversely there is ample evidence that email marketing is a great tool for businesses to leverage in the battle for customer retention, as well as being impactful when it comes to acquiring new customers.
Email lets you reach out directly to people who have interacted with your business before, allowing you to rekindle a relationship that has gone dormant, deal with issues directly if they arise and provide a more personalised approach, which most consumers see as valuable.
Although email is a venerable communications solution at this point, it is still evolving and improving, with modern iterations allowing for more complex, immersive and engaging content to be offered through marketing campaigns which use it.
This means that it is possible for emails to match and even exceed the potential for multimedia integration and interactivity that is afforded by social media.
From including video content in messages to adding surveys and other interactive elements, emails can be made up of much more than plain promotional copy with a couple of images attached.
While some forms of digital marketing can feel like an imposition on consumers, especially in the social media space where ads clog up feeds, there is actually an expectation from plenty of customers that marketing messages sent via email will be worth receiving.
Basically, people are signed up to your mailing list for a reason and so if they like your brand, they will be happy when a new marketing message arrives in their inbox
One of the top EDU offers out there today is International Career Institute.
The pursuit of education has changed in the past decade. An increasing number of students have sought career-oriented education tailored to their specific needs.
Convenience, relevant course work, and affordability have driven many students away from the traditional route of seeking education in a classroom. As such, online institutions like The International Career Institute (ICI) has risen in significance and popularity over the past decade.
That said, marketing education to students eager to learn at their own pace can be tricky business. Through 13 years of trial and error, ICI shares its approach to marketing in the field of education and the usefulness of staying on top of the latest marketing trends and strategies.
Traditionally, it was standard practice for colleges to be featured in directory listings. For a fixed rate, colleges could post courses in the hopes of attracting students. Many directories had a preference for PPL (paying for every potential customer) marketing.
Under the PPL methodology, leads are received at a slow rate. However, potential consumers generally pay higher prices because they have been pre-qualified by third-party referrals. In recent times, many of the career directory platforms have shifted away from this form of advertising and have begun to focus on Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising.
PPC was always ICI’s digital marketing strategy of choice, which brought in a significantly higher number of leads in a short amount of time. The problem was having a big enough budget to outperform the competition.
As more platforms moved to PPC advertising, they found they could not remain profitable due to competing universities that had much larger marketing budgets. It simply was not worth paying top dollar per click on Google.
With PPC marketing becoming saturated and costly, the International Career Institute had to find another way to attract students; a new strategy that focused less on advertising spend and more so on creating helpful career related content which would drive organic traffic as well as improving student experiences.
With this goal in mind, ICI sought out industry experts who excelled in creating top-quality content. Instead of focusing on KPIs or fielding entire divisions of sales teams, ICI allowed their courses to sell themselves.
Having been in operation for 13 years, the International Career Institute has faced its fair share of marketing challenges. Its most difficult challenge to date was the transition from print media to digital media.
Print media, which falls under the umbrella of traditional advertising, can be largely unreliable when it comes to analytics. For example, there’s no way to track the actual number of people you’ve impacted with a flyer, poster, or billboard.
Digital media, on the other hand, allows you to focus precisely on your target audience through analytics. By switching to a digital marketing strategy, ICI was able to collect useful analytics on their student base, allowing them to better determine ROI and improve their ability to effectively spend their marketing budget.
Today, the International Career Institute focuses on providing a better experience for their students by allowing their courses to sell themselves through content marketing. The goal is to provide guidance to students to ensure they choose the course and career path that will meet the students expectations.
In their new shift in marketing, the International Career Institute began to focus on their strengths to draw students in – interest-free payment plans, dedicated student advisors that guide students towards success, course suitability, and regulatory advice.
This new marketing shift did away with sales focused goals. ICI instead focused on a consultative approach with an emphasis on quick response turn-around times when communicating with students.
In doing so, ICI optimized its platform into molding students into the leaders in their field of choice, improving the overall educational experience and eliminating the need for students to take on mountains of debt to obtain a quality education.
It’s one thing to attract students; it’s quite another to get them to stick around. In general, distance learning across the industry has a larger dropout rate then on-campus programs.
To keep students motivated and engaged in the long-term, the International Career Institute poured their resources into providing the best student experience possible.
Tutors have a 2-day turn-around time when engaging in student consultations, and all assignments are responded to and turned around in 7 working days. ICI also gives a 3-year full completion period, giving students a target date to work towards.
By putting students first by quickly responding to their needs and requests, ICI personalizes their experience, thus increasing retention.
By cutting out sales teams and not focusing on KPIs, the International Career Institute can focus on improving student experiences. Since its inception 13 years ago, ICI has employed ethical and responsible marketing practices to reach a greater number of students and offer more courses. ICI is also a signatory to the Code of Ethics instituted by the International Association of Private Career Colleges. A portion of the Code is dedicated to marketing practices.
The education industry is changing, and an increasing number of students are looking for educational programs that put their needs first. ICI has effectively accomplished this goal and continues to serve thousands of students daily.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) hit affiliate marketers related to binary options schemes with record fines this year. Timothy Atkinson, his former business partner Jay Passerino, and their business ‘All in Publishing’ were accused of marketing fraudulent binary options to US customers on behalf of their associated brokers. They imposed these individuals with over $60 million in fines as three US-based binary options marketers bore the brunt of the action.
The SEC today announced the final judgment orders by a Florida federal court against the two affiliates, as well as another marketer called Michael Wright, who “aided and abetted the fraud.”
The complaints allege that the fraud scheme has been going on since at least 2013 through July 2017, and involved fraudulent ad campaigns that relied on other marketers, known as “affiliates,” to promote trading systems and websites. They attracted their victims by sending misrepresentations about the trading platforms, also paying video producers to make fraudulent testimonials promoting the trading systems.
While the SEC describes the defendants’ ads as ‘pure fiction,’ the people in the videos told viewers that they were “enjoying rich lifestyles from trading binary options” and purported to show them that their trading balances increase automatically in live accounts.
The penalties have been the highest ever in such a case, and all three defendants have agreed to settle with the SEC. They will pay $61.5 to the regulator in lieu of disgorgements, ill-gotten gains, and penalties. More specifically, All in Publishing and Atkinson will pay $27,208,987 in disgorgement of their ill-gotten gains and pre-judgment interest of $2,824,935. Apart from that, they will pay a civil penalty of $27,208,987.
Passerino will pay a disgorgement of $1,894,991, civil penalty of $1,894,991 and a pre-judgment interest of $220,431. Wright will pay $266,353 to resolve cases pending against him.
Meanwhile, the CFTC has also filed complaints against the affiliate marketers for using misleading pitches, false claims, and promoting get-rich-quick schemes. The regulator suggests that this fraudulent content was viewed millions of times and at least 50,000 people opened their accounts with different unregulated brokers directly because of the ads.
Programmatic Advertising becomes predictive when marketers use real-time data and artificial intelligence to anticipate consumer needs.
Predictive algorithms are everywhere. In an age when data are plentiful and computing power is mighty and cheap, data scientists increasingly take information on people, companies, and markets—whether given willingly or harvested surreptitiously—and use it to guess the future. Algorithms predict what movie we might want to watch next, which stocks will increase in value, and which advertisement we’re most likely to respond to on social media. Artificial-intelligence tools, like those used for self-driving cars, often rely on predictive algorithms for decision making.
“The way ads are targeted today is radically different from the way it was done 10 or 15 years ago,” said Frederike Kaltheuner, the head of the corporate exploitation program at Privacy International, in the NYTIMES “It’s become exponentially more invasive, and most people are completely unaware of what kinds of data feeds into the targeting.”
Today’s marketers are researching innovative ways to reach their consumers. Technologies like AI, the internet of things, and virtual reality are unfolding and redefining marketing practices. The evolution of social networks is driving new consumers from various networks. Amazon Alexa, Spotify, Netflix, and other apps are providing an advantage to promote and place their products at the top in the consumer’s mind. It is predicted that every year 1 million new users are searching for brands on platforms like Instagram, youtube, etc. This penetration of social networks helps in better brand placements.
Micro movements define the where, how, why, and what movements of consumers. For example, if a consumer searches for a smartwatch, its price, discounts, etc by entering various queries, the data is recorded to predict the consumer’s preference level which may generate unique leads. By analyzing these movements of the consumer, the brands can offer customized products and services to their consumers. The consumer movements include: go, know, do, and buy.
Without automation, the desire to detect and implement micro-movements is not possible. The predictive analytics adds an advantage in forecasting consumer intents before they show interest in purchase.
The transparency of consumers’ data is no longer stronger with the increased mobile-based app service. These data inputs are generated and analyzed by every enterprise so that they can protect their consumers from choosing other offers in the market. With predictive analytics, the enterprise can forecast the consumers who are about to churn in real-time and by providing customized services or offers the enterprise tries to retain their consumers.
Meeting ROI in digital campaigns nowadays has become difficult due to an increase in the presence of brands online. With the increase in the percentage of people using active social accounts and consumers becoming open about their preferences, the brands try hard to reach their consumers to stay ahead of their competitors. With predictive analytics based on the data-driven insights about different market segments and target audience, the future campaign can be redesigned and rescheduled to meet enterprise primary goal of conversion.
Ranging from digital advertising pop-ups to customized or recommendation posts or videos, the companies are spending billions on promotions. The predictive analytics can drive better results with customized short period ads that reduce the cost spent on CPC or PPC based advertising. Through predictive marketing, an enterprise can optimize advertising campaigns automatically with the help of other technologies, which reduces the time spent by advertising managers and teams for an optimized result.
Predictive marketing solves the limitations in digital advertising by predicting the real-time value insights of the consumers. The optimized digital campaigns can generate maximum value of output with minimum cost on digital advertising campaigns. The future of marketing is unfolding various techniques to leverage current and upcoming technologies to maximum market growth of every enterprise by addressing their unique target audiences’ future needs or unlimited wants.
Secondary ticketing site StubHub has just been named in a lawsuit by Spotlight Ticket Management, which alleges that StubHub has violated federal and state law by underreporting commissionable transactions.
Spotlight, which licenses software and ticket platforms used by American Express, alleged StubHub and Awin Inc., known as Awin Global Affiliate Network, for common fraud, tortious interference, violation of the Federal RICO statue, breach of contract, unjust enrichment, and violation of California law.
The company filed a complaint against the secondary site in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California West Division, Legal Newsline reports, alleging that StubHub has been involved in a “years-long campaign” to “under report and misrepresent commissionable transactions” owed to its affiliate network. Spotlight claims that it directed more than $84 million in sales to StubHub and the secondary sites allegedly interfered with its contract with American Express.
“However, through a pattern of conduct, first involving its internal team and later through its external business partner Awin, StubHub defrauded Spotlight and other members of its affiliate program in order to drive StubHub’s sales while underreporting sales and underpaying commissions, and then engaging in retaliatory conduct towards Spotlight when Spotlight sought to correct this wrong,” the suit said.
Ann Mortimer and Jason Kim of Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP in Los Angeles. Spotlight is seeking damages, a trial by jury, and all other just relief.
As an industry that has a history of settling for vanity metrics, influencer marketing is particularly susceptible to fraud. Recently, CBS reported that influencer marketing suffered from $1.3B in fraud in 2019. More than half of influencers in the UK had engaged in some sort of fraudulent activity, according to a recent study. Let that sink in — that’s billions wasted on false measurement, in an industry in which brands are still ramping up spend. In some regions, finding reliable influencers has the same odds as flipping a coin.
To their credit, influencers themselves don’t have much choice. Considering that the go-to metric is “engagement” and the next is “follower count,” influencers live in the same environment as cyclists do in the Tour de France. In effect, they have no way to truly compete unless they use outside tools to enhance their performance, because so many others are doing it.
Though buying fake follows is blatant, there are also grayer areas in the emerging sector, which brings economic costs higher still. These include widespread use of Automation software to follow and unfollow users automatically to secure a net increase in followers; so-called “pods” trading mutually beneficial shares and engagement; and influencers inflating their value by deceiving brands into believing they enjoy endorsements from companies.
That fraudulent activity is costing advertisers $1.3 billion this year, according to a report from Cheq, a cybersecurity company focused on the digital media space, and University of Baltimore economist and professor Roberto Cavazos. And that’s only what is blatantly fraud.
On top of this, there is a huge amount what is called influencer ‘‘pods’’ – which allow influencers to “trade engagement back and forth” amongst themselves. This operation involves one influencer commenting on, or liking, a certain number of posts, and is reimbursed in kind with comments on their own activity and posts.
While this behavior serves to boost engagement with influencers’ Instagram posts, it is clearly not what brands have in mind when creating and paying for. And these inflated clicks and likes, are definitely fraudulent but hard to detect.
As many people have pointed out– if these influencers are so “influential,” why aren’t the engaging in pay-per-performance campaigns? They would make considerably more money, and more importantly, prove they aren’t frauds.
Since the Food and Drug Administration can’t figure out whether supplements that contain cannabidiol, the marijuana-adjacent oil known as CBD, are legal, can a customer who thought they were buying a legal product demand their money back?
A group of remorseful CBD users is suing to test that theory, and it’s going after the companies that put CBD on the map — and according to Vice Magazine, “CBD Marketing Went Too Far, and New Lawsuits Might Take It Down.”
“Unlike previous suits—most of which targeted things like false claims about the amount of CBD in a product, or what CBD products claim to do—these new lawsuits are focused on the simple fact that products contain CBD in the first place.”
In two major lawsuits recently filed against Charlotte’s Web and CV Sciences, two of the largest CBD manufacturers in the country, consumers allege that the companies engaged in “false, fraudulent, unfair, deceptive, and misleading” marketing of their CBD products by claiming they were run-of-the-mill dietary supplements, like vitamin D or iron. Similar lawsuits have also been filed against at least two other smaller CBD makers, Infinite CBD and Green Roads. In all of the cases, they are asking a judge to force the companies to return all of the profits they’ve made from those sales, which could decimate the nascent industry.
This potentially disastrous spate of lawsuits is the latest frustrating development for the CBD industry. Despite raking in millions, as interest in CBD skyrockets, CBD manufacturers have been waiting for more than a year for clear rules from the FDA on how they can legally sell these wildly popular products. Manufacturers say this spate of lawsuits is the latest in a series of negative repercussions caused by the FDA’s struggle to set clear rules of the road, and that these lawsuits are likely to continue until the FDA acts.
“We’re just going to see a lot of this sort of mischief go on until the FDA does what it needs to be doing, which is establishing a formal regulatory framework for CBD,” said Jonathan Miller, general counsel of the U.S. Hemp Roundtable, the trade association for hemp and CBD companies, which counts both Charlotte’s Web and CV Sciences as members.
Facebook ads illegally promoting a debt relief scam seem to be all over the internet — and feature celebrity rapper and marijuana aficionado Snoop Dog
“If you owe $10,000 on your credit card, look. You can qualify for a program and get you thousands of your dollars back by making a 15-minute phone call,” he said in one video cited by Vice News. Debt Council claimed to be able to erase debt through a government loophole and paid $274,000 for ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram, Vice News’ investigation explained. But there is no such government loophole.
In reality, Debt Council is a referral company claiming to match consumers with other debt relief firms.
But referral services often sell your contact information, which can then be used to market to you directly- or make sure that you get even more ads of similar ilk via social media platforms.
Rapper Jermaine Dupri has also done a video testimonial for Debt Council, according to Vice.
It appears that the artists may have created the videos through Cameo, a service that allows fans to pay for personalized messages from celebrities.
When Vice News alerted Facebook to the ads, Facebook flagged them for violating its policy for deceptive or misleading business practices and its rule against imagery of public figures to get people to buy into a scam.
The Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”) is cracking down on CBD. The government agency has confirmed that it sent new letters to 15 companies, including Koi CBD, Bella Rose Labs, Pink Collections, and Whole Leaf Organics, late last month for “illegally selling products that contain cannabidiol (“CBD”)” – from supplement gummies to various skincare goods – in “ways that violate the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.” The letters are part of a larger effort by the agency to “explore potential pathways for various types of CBD products,” including drugs, food, dietary supplements, cosmetics, and animal health products, “to be lawfully marketed.”
In its November 22 letters, the FDA cracked down on more than a dozen businesses that have offered for sale and sold products containing CBD, an active ingredient in cannabis, albeit without the psychoactive, high-inducing chemical, taking issue (in large part) with the specific marketing of the products.
The government agency – which is responsible for protecting the public health by assuring the safety, efficacy and security of drugs, biological products, medical devices, food, cosmetics, and radiation-emitting products – asserts that “unlike the FDA-approved CBD drug product [Epidiolex], unapproved CBD products, which could include unapproved drugs, cosmetics, foods, and products marketed as dietary supplements, have not been subject to FDA evaluation regarding whether they are effective to treat a particular disease or have other effects that may be claimed.”
Interestingly, though, the FDA’s lack of approval for virtually all CBD products on the market does not legally prohibit companies from selling products containing the ingredient. As CNN states, it is “not illegal to sell products that are not approved by the FDA.” (Cigarettes, after all, are not approved by the FDA, and under the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, cosmetic products and ingredients are not subject to premarket approval by FDA, except for most color additives).
The problem in the eyes of the FDA is not in the simple sale of CBD products, as CBD is not restricted from being included in products, such as cosmetics. Instead, it is centers on the specific marketing of these CBD-containing products and/or the addition of CBD to food and beverages, as “it is currently illegal to market CBD by adding it to a food or labeling it as a dietary supplement,” says the FDA, as CBD is not characterized as a dietary supplement under the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act.
With the foregoing in mind, the FDA has required that the companies it contacted “take prompt action to correct the violations” of law that it asserted and that they “notify FDA in writing, within fifteen working days of receipt of this letter, of the specific steps you have taken to correct these violations” in order to avoid legal action.
The letters from the FDA come several months after action by a separate government agency. In a September 10 release, the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) revealed that it had sent a second round of letters of its own, taking action against three currently unnamed companies that “sell oils, tinctures, capsules, gummies, and creams containing CBD.” The FTC stated that each of the companies that received letters had “advertised that its CBD products treat or cure serious diseases and health conditions,” ranging from anorexia, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, and depression to heart disease, cancer, and “a wide spectrum of autoimmune disorders.”
According to the FTC, one company went so far as to assert that it has participated in “thousands of hours of research” with Harvard researchers to “bolster its claims that CBD has been ‘clinically proven’ to treat cancer,” among other illnesses.
It is unclear whether the companies on the receiving end of the FTC’s letters can actually back up their claims, advertising claims must be “supported by competent and reliable scientific evidence” in accordance with the FTC’s requirement that all express and implied advertising claims, including health claims, be substantiated before they are disseminated by way of a company’s marketing.
The increased attention of regulators comes as companies, including cosmetics ones, flood the market with CBD-infused products, creating an industry with sales that are expected to top $5 billion in 2019 – a 700 percent increase from 2018 – and reach $24 billion in sales by 2023.
If you look around the thousands of stores and shops across New York that sell CBD products, you’d probably answer “Yes, of course.” You can find CBD in everything from chocolate bars and gummi candy to lemonade and lattes. They’re sold at coffee shops, health food stores, dedicated CBD retail outlets — even gas stations.
But since mid-summer, New York state regulators have had a different take: The state Department of Agriculture & Markets issued an advisory letter July 19 that says CBD is illegal in New York when added to food or drinks. The advisory does not apply to topical oils, patches, oral tinctures or other uses. It also does not apply to foods or beverages containing hemp seed oil (without CBD).
This summer, it forced Beak & Skiff Orchards in LaFayette to pull back a CBD Cold Brew Coffee before it even made it to the shelves.
And, at the 2019 New York State Fair, Ag & Markets inspectors stopped vendors from selling edible or drinkable CBD.
On top of this, adding CBD to food or drinks is prohibited in New York City.
“As of July 1, 2019, the Health Department is embargoing food and drink products that contain CBD — the products will have to be returned to the supplier or discarded,” the city’s health department said.
With fines of up to $600 per incident, it can cost a company thousands and thousands of dollars for selling a smoothie.
A Facebook Inc. contractor has been fired for taking thousands of dollars in bribes from a shady marketing firm that had already been banned from the platform, according to a BuzzFeed report Tuesday.
It was discovered that the employee, based in a Facebook office located in Austin, Texas, had taken $5,000 in bribes to reinstate banned ads from the marketing company, Ads Inc. The company is no longer in business.
Ads Inc. had already been banned from Facebook after running a scam that involved luring people in by posting untrue claims about certain celebrities. They’d then be taken to a website which was running a “Free Trial” scam. In short, such scams offer a free trial when in fact there will be a charge. In that case, the person would unknowingly be charged monthly.
“This behavior is absolutely prohibited under our policies and the individual is no longer working with Facebook,” Facebook said in a statement to media. “We’re continuing to investigate the allegations and will take any further necessary action.”
There might have been more than one Facebook employee taking bribes from Ads Inc., according to BuzzFeed, which was contacted by an unnamed source familiar with the matter. That person said, “To be honest there were a few people that would flip ads back on,” adding that if the ads didn’t run for at least two days, the “mole” wouldn’t be paid.
That same person said someone might be offered a $5,000 flat or rate or be put on a $3,000 monthly retainer. He said if anyone noticed, they could just “play dumb” and call it an accident. The unnamed person said the accounts were spending millions of dollars and so needed this kind of help.
Note: I have seen PERSONALLY more than once people paid large sums of cash for doing the same — including one Facebook employee at Affiliate Summit.
A coalition of twenty-three state attorneys general, led by New York AG Letitia James and Pennsylvania AG Josh Shapiro, recently submitted a letter to the Federal Trade Commission to use its rulemaking authority to further expand existing negative option regulations.
“We’re urging the FTC to take action and use its power to protect consumers from the harm of predatory marketers,” said Attorney General James. “Deceptive marketing hurts us all, which is why I will continue to use every tool in my office’s arsenal to protect consumers and stop marketers from targeting consumers.”
With negative option marketing, a marketer presents consumers with an offer and the consumers’ silence or failure to take action in response to that offer is deemed acceptance or approval of the offer.
According to the coalition, one especially problematic type of negative option offer involves “free” trial offers, where consumers are offered free trial periods of products or services. To receive the free trial, consumers are required to submit their credit or debit card number.
The coalition points out that the free trial has additional terms and conditions — which are often not clearly or conspicuously disclosed to the consumer — stating that unless consumers cancel the goods or services they are agreeing to continue to receive and pay for them. The letter states that when companies do not remind consumers before their free trials come to an end, consumers are often charged without their knowledge or consent.
In their letter, the coalition of attorneys general recommends that FTC attorneys expand regulations in order to achieve the following:
Last year, California’s revised its Automatic Renewal Law. It is now widely recognized as the most stringent ARL in the nation.
The updated law requires, amongst other things, that advertisers doing business in California, to allow online cancellation of auto-renewing memberships or recurring purchases that were initiated online. It provides, in part, that a consumer who accepts an automatic renewal or continuous service offer online shall be allowed to terminate the automatic renewal or continuous service exclusively online.
It also requires a seller that provides an automatic offer that includes a free gift, trial, or promotional pricing to notify consumers about how to cancel the auto renewal before they are charged.
Sellers must also set forth the price to be charged when the promotion or free trial ends. If the initial offer is at a promotional price that is only for a limited time and will increase later, the seller must obtain consumer consent to the non-discounted price prior to billing.
The Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act requires a seller to clearly and conspicuously disclose material terms of a transaction and to obtain the consumer’s consent prior to the charge. State automatic renewal laws are largely inconsistent in terms of scope, however, most require the clear and conspicuous disclosure of material terms and policies.
Consult with experienced FTC defense attorneys about different state requirements, and which states require notice prior to the renewal in order to give consumers an opportunity to cancel.
Attorney General James and Pennsylvania Attorney General Shapiro drafted the letter, which has the support of the attorneys general of Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, and the District of Columbia.
Takeaway: Always use “clear and conspicuous” language to disclose all material terms. Inform consumers of all material terms, including cancellation policies. Provide cancellation instructions prior to permitting a consumer the ability to purchase any goods or services online. Ensure that the cancellation process is simple to use and ensure that an online mechanism is provided. Always obtain affirmative consent prior to charging consumers’ credit cards or other payment methods. Never fail to disclose material changes before they are effective. Confirm all terms by providing an acknowledgement with all material terms and cancellation procedures. Know which laws, rules and regulations may be applicable to your marketing activities.
Richard B. Newman is an FTC lawyer at Hinch Newman LLP. You can find him on Facebook @ FTC Defense Attorney.
Informational purposes only. Not legal advice. May be considered advertising material.
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