The Better Business Bureau is setting its sights on advertisers who are not in compliance with required privacy disclosures for their digital marketing campaigns.
The BBB, however, is drawing particular attention to native ads.
The organization’s Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program just published a “compliance warning” this week noting that companies fusing Interest-Based Advertising (IBA) with native ads “must provide consumers with transparency and control, just as they would with any other interest-based ad.”
The BBB will effectively start enforcing the Native Advertising Compliance Warning on January 1, 2015.
“The Accountability Program’s mission is to build trust in online advertising by helping to ensure that all companies in the ecosystem live up to the advertising industry’s commitment to self-regulation,” says Genie Barton, Director of the Accountability Program. “Compliance warnings, complaints, monitoring and publicly reported enforcement decisions are some of the ways that the Accountability Program fulfills this mission.”
In the coming days, the BBB will also take steps to help publishers learn what they can do to avoid failing to provide enhanced notices with regard to behavioral targeting.
“Accordingly, the Native Advertising Compliance Warning reminds all companies involved in the ad serving chain of a tailored native ad that the OBA Principles require them to provide consumers with notice, including real-time notice about IBA in, around, or the on the same page as the ad, as well as the opportunity to exercise meaningful choice about participating in IBA,” the BBB explains. “Companies may use the familiar Advertising Option Icon (AdChoices Icon) to alert consumers to the presence of an interest-based ad and the location of an IBA opt out, or they may use a phrase that provides a clear disclosure. The compliance warning also reminds websites that display interest-based native ads to provide enhanced notice when they allow third parties to collect data for IBA.”