Department of Advertising

FTC Evidentiary Issues

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

As this web site develops, in the space below we will provide a bibliography of articles and books relevant to this topic. To the extent practical, bibliographic references will be annotated.

Anyone interested in submitting additional bibliographic material for this reference page, or for any of the others at this site, is welcome to send such material via e-mail to jef@mail.utexas.edu. Please type the references in the same format as is used here, and keep the annotations to a few sentences.

Evidence of the Conveyed Message

  1. Ivan L. Preston and Jef I. Richards (1993). A Role for Consumer Belief in FTC and Lanham Act Deceptive Advertising Cases. American Business Law Journal, 31(1): 1-29.

    The FTC, when it uses behavioral research, tends to rely on survey evidence of what consumers comprehend the advertisement to say. These authors assert that "belief" is a more appropriate measure of consumer deception than is "comprehension." They also explain how the FTC could adopt such a standard without necessarily increasing the agency's evidentiary burden.

  2. Jef I. Richards (1990). Deceptive Advertising: Behavioral Study of a Legal Concept. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

    This book attempts to integrate legal and behavioral approaches to deceptive advertising, showing how behavioral research in this area is best applied to be useful to the legal system. It discusses both the contributions and possible mistakes of behavioral researchers, in their attempts to contribute to the understanding of how consumers are deceived. It then provides a purportedly improved definition of deception that melds the two perspectives, and an information processing model that describes the deception process. A new, experimental, method is then proposed for testing whether or not an advertisement is deceptive. Finally, the author tests the proposed method for validity.

  3. Ivan Preston (1984). How the FTC Prosecutes Advertising Claims Based on Surveys. Proceedings of the 1984 Convention of the American Academy of Advertising, (ed.), Donald R. Glover: 98-103.

    This paper provides a detailed description of the 25 cases of advertising practices which have been judged deceptive by the FTC since 1976 because of misuse of surveys cited as support for advertising claims.

Substantiation

  1. John S. Healey and Harold H. Kassarjian (1983). Advertising Substantiation and Advertiser Response: A Content Analysis of Magazine Advertisements. Journal of Marketing, 47 (Winter): 107-117.

    This study reports the changes that have occurred since the adaptation of the FTC program requiring advertisers to substantiate ad claims. The content of print ads subject to the claim substantiation which appeared in sixteen consumer magazines before and after the program are compared. Results indicate that the number of attribute claims have somewhat decreased and the types of evidence supporting claims have changed since the adaptation of the program, but that the level of informativeness in the ads has not.

  2. Mary Jane Sheffet (1983). An Experimental Investigation of the Documentation of Advertising Claims. Journal of Advertising, 12 (1): 19-29.

    The effects of three manipulated variables, type of advertised claim (experience, search, and credence), source of the disclosure (FTC or the manufacturer) and level of involvement (high or low), are explored on brand attitudes. The study consists of the responses from a sample of female household heads at shopping centers, who are shown ads for fictitious brands of products. Results indicate that for some types of claims, disclosure of test results available from a company yields more favorable attitudes toward using a brand than does disclosure of test results available from the FTC.

© 1995, 1996, 1997 Jef I. Richards
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