I guess that’s a valid point. How often are celebrities paid directly by the company, vs. through an advertising agency.
It also seems to me that “truth in advertising” is an important if overlooked concept. If Bob Schmoe, well known actor, says “Buy this stuff. I do, I know that it’s great.” then they better be telling the truth. “It’s great” is an opinion, but Bob better actually be buying the product; and if it turns out to not remotely live up to the expectations implied by his endorsement, that may be a problem. (“buy these caffeine-amphetamine pills, you’ll sleep like a baby with no side effects.”) OTOH if Bob is in a comedy skit where he never actually comes out as himself and says “buy this!” then he’s just an actor saying lines.
Some Tom, Dick or Harry is endorsing reverse mortgages, then he’d better be right. What I got from those is that you can set the repayment - if any - terms (based on actuarials) and you’ll never have to leave your house until you choose to. If neither of those is true, hen the commercial is lying, and if a celebrity is saying this as themselves, then they are either outright lying or lying through negligence and lack of due diligence. Whether it’s a good idea? Depends on the home owner. What’s more important, living a comfortable life in old age or ensuring Junior hits the jackpot at age 70? (Oh wait, then he can live comfortably in his old age.)
Fascinating article, incredible how they were able to track down the man with the video server, though he was sentenced and released from a Korean jail in less than two years. Lax laws there it seems.
Gruesome in extreme the staggering number of child sexual abuse videos created and shared by men from all walks of life.
There was a point I brought up earlier that no one addressed or had any answers for. I don’t know about all the celebrity endorsers. I do know that Tom Brady and Giselle were given millions of dollars in equity in FTX for their participation. They became part owners of the company. I don’t know what percentage. Certainly not enough to make business decisions for the company. But does this make them more liable or less liable? The plaintiffs can argue they are as liable as any other owner. The ex-Bradys can argue that they were victims of a fraud just like the plaintiffs which lost them millions.
I am not sure I accept that premise. The entire notion of negligence is bound up in the idea that there are certain things that someone ought to know or do before committing to engage in an activity that is potentially harmful or illegal. If someone offers you a job where your duty is to hunt down people, forcibly detain them, and hand them over to your employer, and you end up getting prosecuted for kidnapping, is it an absolute defence to say that you believed, without actually having done the bare minimum of checking, that you were working for a licensed bail enforcement agency and not the mafia? Similarly, are there certain claims that a spokesperson is incumbent upon verifying before uttering them on behalf of his or her employer? If I hire a famous actor to publically name an innocent party as a child molester, and that actor takes me at my word, does the actor escape all civil and criminal liability for defamation?
• A representation, omission, or practice misleads
or is likely to mislead the consumer;
• A consumer’s interpretation of the representation,
omission, or practice is considered reasonable
under the circumstances; and
• The misleading representation, omission, or practice is material
In their interpretation of that rule, the FTC states "Endorsements must reflect the honest opinions, findings, beliefs, or experience of the endorser. Furthermore, an endorsement may not convey any express or implied representation that would be deceptive if made directly by the advertiser. (Emphasis added.)
Furthermore “Advertisers are subject to liability for false or unsubstantiated statements made through endorsements, or for failing to disclose material connections between themselves and their
endorsers [see § 255.5]. Endorsers also may be liable for statements made in the course of their endorsements.” (Emphasis added.)
The pages and pages of legal gobbledygook covering truth in advertising actually protect both the advertiser and the celebrity endorser - the advertiser gets protection when the celebrity goes off-script and starts making claims the lawyers would never allow, and the endorser gets protection from the advertiser unfairly cashing in on their name. But those protections require self-enforcement by both parties.
I don’t think I need to quote any more. This analogy just makes no sense; Larry David wasn’t being asked to do anything illegal. He was being asked to ACT. That’s legal no matter who asks you to do it. Not one reasonable person who has ever lived would have thought what he was doing was illegal.
In this circumstance? No.
There is no reasonable way that any of the employed actors could have known FTX was engaging in criminal activity. What FTX claimed to be doing was legal. What they asked the actors to say wasn’t in any way an enticement to doing illegal things. In fact, from what I can tell, basically everyone thought FTX was on the level until it collapsed. What FTX was doing that WAS illegal was in fact quite different from the service it provided to its clients. The FTX business was perfectly legal; the scam was that people were stealing the money out the back door.
If the owner of a grocery store was secretly running a meth lab in the storeroom, would you blame the local celebrity who did a radio ad for their sale on chicken thighs? It’s legal to buy and sell chicken.
Part of the problem is really rooted in who we are calling “celebrities”. Pretty much all of them fail the definition - we don’t actually celebrate their lives. They are just well known. Some are just famous for being famous. But Joe public seems to be swayed by such people.
Then there is the split between actors and the rest. Actors act. If they are acting in the endorsement, it is clearly a different question to presenting themselves as themselves. Well known actors appearing in advertisements is hardly new. Nor is actors performing endorsements.
There is always a reasonableness test. Would a reasonable person be swayed by the celebrity versus a non-celebrity doing the same thing?
A celebrity saying “I’ve done my research so you don’t have to” is going to be screwed.
Nowadays we have an entire industry of “influencers.” That starts to make more concrete the question. If someone is selling themselves (or usually their social media presence) as an influencer, we are at least being clear about the relationship. How exposed any influencer is to liability is going to be really interesting. Internet scams are a part of life, and the international nature of the Internet makes chasing home the blame very hard.
Right now there is an interesting one in the spotlight that I bet many here will have seen. Established Titles. I doubt anyone actually believed the spiel that you are actually getting title to a square foot of Scotland, and them becoming a Lord. (The whole thing isn’t even original.) But it seems that the company is aggressively pursuing a lot of credible You Tubers, and getting pretty good mileage from them. They obtain well crafted personalised coverage, with many content creators showing off their own title and certificate, and even offer that if you use their link, you get a plot of land next to theirs. Given it is a novelty purchase, it isn’t harmful by itself, but it isn’t real either. (The company does it seems actually own some land, but whether they keep track of how much they have sold versus how much they own is another matter.)
The same parent company owns Kamikoto knives. These are also seeing a huge uptick in endorsements from well established quality You Tubers. The knives are not made in Japan nor of Japanese steel, and are apparently low quality, so the scam there is more concrete.
There are other less happy endorsements out there as well. Crypto is probably the worst, but Art is another. How insulated the influencers will be from blow-back will be interesting. There are a lot of very naive creators taking money.
There is a term to describe people who leverage others people’s confidence in them to sell crap/snake oil/non existent assets.
They are called conmen and are generally understood to be doing something bad.
How is a celebrity selling something without doing any homework on the product any different.
This is different from the director, sound engineer etc. making money with their professional skills because nobody could reasonably confuse doing a job like that with an endorsement.
Actors are a bit of a grey area here, but let’s say that you’re off the hook if the ads brings in more than 5% than what you made the last 5 years. David might be in the clear: IHMO he was doing an acting job. Brady not so much.
An unrecognizable random schmoe playing what’s clearly a role is distinct from a readily recognizable actor playing what’s clearly a role is distinct from a recognizable actor speaking as the actor, not as a character. The latter is little bit distinct from a recognizable non-actor speaking as themselves, not as a character.
Whether any of these logical distinctions rise to a legal difference is the key question. I don’t think there’s a real bright line between any of them, but there is a world of difference between the two extremes.
So their strategy was to quickly become Too Big To Fail so we’d have to step in if anything went wrong not because any law said so but because, hey, we’d have to.
Can’t really blame them for absorbing well the lessons of 2008.
I admit this is a definition of “Celebrity” I’ve never heard before. All my life “Celebrity” has meant “Famous people, especially those working in an entertainment industry.”
The teens weren’t buying the acne medication, their parents were. A 13 year old in 1978 was born in 1965. If their parents were 20 at the time the teen was born the parents were born in 1945, prime Pat Boone demographics.
I’m running into the limits of my command of English.
I meant to convey that IMHO there is a difference between people leveraging a skill (acting/directing etc.) and someone leveraging their fame, their good name: their “celebrity” status.
I meant someone like Brady, he’s not involved in a ad campaign for anything else than having a recognizable face. There is no way to interpret his involvement as anything but an endorsement.