BBB and FTC target questionable advertising.
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Each year the St. Louis Better Business Bureau receives about 350 consumer complaints about advertising practices and opens another 400 cases on its own. The cited advertisements are allegedly unethical or even illegal. “Advertising practices are a very small percentage of our complaints because consumers sometimes are not aware they are being mislead, or they don’t do business with the company so they don’t take the time to register a complaint,” said Michelle Corey, president and chief executive officer of the BBB. “We also do our own monitoring. We review newspaper ads, and broadcast as well. We look for anything that sounds too good to be true, violates ethical standards or violates state or federal law.” The St. Louis BBB and the Federal Trade Commission hosted a conference on advertising law, “Green Lights and Red Flags,” during May in Clayton. Questionable advertising tactics are so common that some businesses challenged by the BBB say they got the ideas from other companies’ advertising, Corey said. “There are cases where we believe the advertisers did not know they were doing something wrong. They say they have seen others run similar ads and didn’t think anything was… |