BBB National Programs Blog

Although businesses can advertise the benefits of their products, all messages conveyed by the advertising must be supported by a reasonable basis. Failure to adequately support a health or wellness claim can quickly get a business into trouble.

The recently updated 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGAs) ask us to “make every bite count.” This is an important message in a year when parents have faced challenges on so many fronts, including cooking for their families and eating at home more often than pre-pandemic. For parents feeding very young children, timely guidance in the form of the latest edition of the DGAs arrived at the end of 2020 when, for the first time, they addressed the diets of infants and toddlers.

Nonprofit organizations are often viewed as fundamentally different than for-profit enterprises, but those of us known as “bridgers” see striking similarities, albeit through a professional bifocal lens. We bridgers have transitioned in our careers from publicly traded or privately owned for-profit enterprises to nonprofit organizations, often with a goal to grow these nonprofits in pursuit of their missions. Our insights from both sides of “the bridge” provide us a dual perspective, where we can see that the needs, limitations and goals of for-profits and nonprofits are closer than they may seem at first glance.

In class action settlements, the cy pres doctrine allows for the distribution of unclaimed settlement funds to non-profit organizations that indirectly benefit the injured class. NAD fulfills its consumer protection mission through its own robust independent monitoring and investigation of misleading advertising in the marketplace.

Though the food advertising world has changed in many ways, health claims continue to play a role in food advertising and present challenges. Today’s food and beverage purchase decisions are influenced by far more than price, taste, familiarity, and brand loyalty.

When the Children’s Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) passed in 1998, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) began to approve industry groups to administer an independent, self-regulatory program that implements protections for children as outlined in the COPPA Rule. The Children’s Advertising Review Unit (CARU) was the first such group in the U.S. to receive FTC approval. Learn more about what's behind the CARU Safe Harbor seal.

During this year’s National Consumer Protection Week it's worth taking a closer look at how advertising fits into the consumer protection puzzle. Consumer protection is core to our mission at NAD and critical to a robust and competitive marketplace. Here we outline seven distinct advantages of filing an NAD challenge.

Though the annual celebration of Black History Month is drawing to a close, the plethora of issues raised by the study of Black history must always remain top of mind. For those of us who work in truth in advertising at NAD, we are paying very close attention to the issues of diversity and stereotyping, as presented in various forms of advertising.

BBB National Programs’ National Advertising Division is dedicated to truth-in-advertising. To help you ensure that influencer marketing and the use of product reviews in your advertising is both transparent and truthful, we offer the following five tips.

As business and nonprofit leaders navigate the Fourth Industrial Revolution, consumer and stakeholder privacy has become a matter of defining trust. As new digital services and connected devices fueled by personal data flourish, consumers’ reasonable expectation of privacy shifts. If expectations do not match reality, it can lead to gaps in trust and new paths for litigation and regulatory enforcement. In this piece I outline a few 2021 privacy developments business and nonprofit leaders should note.