I can’t help but snicker to think that PR people engaging in the unethical practice of fake product reviews, or at least those defending them, are now trying to cling to the First Amendment to justify their actions.
So goes the defense of Reverb Communications, the firm that represents the makers of the game Rock Band and other popular games. For several months, employees of Reverb engaged in the practice of posting online user comments – always favorable, of course – about their clients’ products. They did not identify themselves having any connection with or financial stake in the product. For all anyone would have known, they were just ordinary gamers who loved the products.
When the practice was exposed, comments to news stories about the incident – many of them from PR pros themselves – insisted that the folks at Reverb had a constitutional freedom-of-speech right to do what they were doing.
Really? Ahhh…no.
First of all, no they don’t. FTC guidelines clearly state that you have to be transparent in what you communicate on behalf of clients. Sure, you can say the product is great. There’s no regulation against that. It’s commercial speech. But you can’t pretend to be a disinterested observer. That’s fraud.
The FTC doesn’t agree that PR firms enjoy the same First Amendment protections as journalists, nor does it see a press release as the equivalent of a news story. That’s promotional copy you’re writing (Nike vs. Kasky). You know how you hate it when someone asks your mother what you do, and she says, “He’s in PR. It’s like advertising.” Well, I hate to tell you this, but she’s right. And you have to follow the rules accordingly.
But let’s say for the sake of argument that PR people are just like journalists. When a journalist is reporting on a story in which he or she has a vested interest, the journalist is expected at a minimum to engage in full disclosure and alert readers about the real or perceived conflict of interest.
The people who wrote these reviews didn’t do that, and that’s the real problem here. Reverb defends them by saying they bought the games with their own money and played them on their own time. Even if true, that doesn’t matter. The fact that they work for the PR firm that represents the game manufacturers is clearly relevant information that a review reader would want to know, and it’s not okay to conceal it, no matter who paid for the game or when you played it.
I don’t know what’s worse here – that these fake reviews were written, or that so many other PR pros, in defending the practice, demonstrated that they themselves have no idea what the rules are.
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2 Responses
2010 Sep 02
Great points all around, Ann. The whole Reverb issue is quite disheartening as a PR practitioner, especially after you see/read how the agency handled the aftermath of the situation, with its obfuscation, bizarre reasoning for its fake reviews and other less-than-transparent attempts to dodge what is a ruling by a government organization that essentially, the agency and its employees messed up and they need to face the consequences.
I think you hit the nail on the head that even if, for the sake of argument, we consider PR pros to be just like journalists in terms of their freedom of speech rights, journalists still have an obligation (and in almost every case, a mandate from their employer) to fully disclose any professional or personal connections they have to what they are writing about. It’s why you see a paragraph in many Wall Street Journal articles noting how the WSJ is owned by News Corp.
So even if Reverb’s employees bought these products on their own time and with their own money (e.g. making it a personal connection), they are still professionally connected to this client in some way, even if they are not on the account. That requires full disclosure.
2010 Sep 02
Keith,
Thanks so much for your comments. Nice to know there are more ethical practitioners out there who pay attention to the rules than those that don’t. The problem is that messing up makes bigger news!