The disclosure has to sit on the claim

Answer If a disclosure is what keeps a claim from being deceptive, it has to be clear and conspicuous, and as close as possible to the claim. That is the FTC's digital disclosure guidance. A disclaimer that lives only on the landing page does not cover the sentence in the solo ad. This note is not legal advice. It is a placement rule you can check before you pay.

The note that started this: .com Disclosures: How to Make Effective Disclosures in Digital Advertising, Federal Trade Commission.

Affiliate mail is full of sentences that are only true with a qualifier. Results vary. The price is introductory. The person in the story was paid. The stock is a hypothetical. Those qualifiers are often one click away, in a footer the reader meets after they have already been sold the mood. Solo ads for affiliate marketing still have to carry the qualifier in the message that makes the claim.

The Commission's .com Disclosures guidance is the document for this, not a blog's paraphrase of a font size. The guidance does not hand you a pixel height. Clear and conspicuous is a performance question. Did the person notice the disclosure, read it, and understand it, next to the claim it modifies? If the answer depends on a click they have no reason to make, the disclosure is not doing the job. The FTC has also said that if you cannot make the disclosure clear on a given format, you should not run the claim on that format.

Where does a disclosure have to appear in a solo ad?

If a disclosure is needed to keep a claim from being deceptive, the FTC's digital disclosure guidance says it has to be clear and conspicuous and as close as possible to the claim. A later page does not do that job for the email.

Close means close. The income sentence and the sentence that says most people do not earn that are neighbors, or they are the same sentence. The word free and the word that names the subscription that starts on Tuesday are neighbors. A pale line under a wall of images is not close. It is storage.

Email is a cramped format, which is the excuse. The excuse is the reason to cut the claim, not the reason to hide the qualifier. If the message cannot hold the truth in the same breath as the pitch, the pitch is too large for the message. Send a smaller pitch. A solo ad is one email. It is not a website. Write it so the one email is true standing alone.

• The claim and the qualifier are in the same message.
• The qualifier is in text, not only inside an image.
• The reader does not have to click to learn the condition.
• The subject line does not contradict the qualifier.

Does a disclaimer on the landing page cover the email?

No. The claim in the email is what the reader sees before the click. A disclosure that exists only after the click does not qualify the sentence that produced the click.

This is the move in almost every swipe file. The email says the dream. The page says the terms, below the fold, after the video, in a color close to the background. The click already happened. The FTC's point about proximity is that the qualifying information has to meet the claim, not the thank-you page. If you are the buyer of the solo, you are responsible for the claim you asked the seller to send. The seller's list did not agree to discover the terms later.

Read the email as if the landing page 404s. If the email is then false, fix the email. Do not add a longer footer to the page and call the pair compliant. The pair is not what the inbox showed.

Is this a complete legal rule for affiliate mail?

No. This note is not legal advice. Read the FTC guidance and get advice for your own offer. The desk rule is simpler: do not make a claim you can only explain somewhere else.

There is no dollar figure in this note on purpose. Penalties change, and a blog is the wrong place to invent one. There is no magic font size either. The guidance is about whether a reasonable reader gets the qualifying information. If you need a lawyer, hire one. If you need a desk test, read the email out loud and see whether you flinch and point at a different URL.

Put the disclosure on the claim. Then the click, if it comes, comes from a sentence that can stand up. That is the whole placement rule for July 15.