No Safe Harbor is great for consumers' mindset

Regarding the recent FTC Guidelines

Frank Kern got it right:

"And while I’m sure these fake blogs played a major role in the FTC ruling, all those people telling you that this is all about blogs …"

"“…The most significant change to the revised guides is the deletion of the “safe harbor” that has long allowed advertisers to use testimonials who reported specific successful experiences with an advertised product or service as long as the advertiser included a disclaimer such as “Results not typical.” Under the revised Guides, advertisements that feature a consumer and convey his or her experience with a product or service as typical when that is not the case will be required to clearly disclose the results that consumers can generally expect.”

ShoeMoney got it partially right and partially wrong (this was pointed out by Michael Webster of Bizop.ca here). Here's the wrong part:

"Obviously this is totally targeted at the fake news and blog websites. I think we will see heavy enforcement in these areas from these new rules."

I think people steeped in the study and sometimes cultish atmosphere of direct marketing – (including myself in the past) – sometimes have a hard time understanding the value of something like doing away with "safe harbor" in the guidelines.

I recently threw up a parody site called How I Made 10 Billion Dollars a Month Posting a Link on Google here which really drove home an important point the more I thought about the site which includes testimonials such as:

"Saw this blog a few months back. Filled out the online form last night and today I woke up and there was a check for $3,200 in my mailbox. I haven’t even received any of the kits yet!"

That may seem hilarious to a direct marketing copywriter or an internet marketer, but the problem is the following promises don't seem hilarious to many of the same people (these aren't all testimonials, but they are all pulled from current sales letters):

• "*Shocking* Proven 'done-for-you' money maker generates up to $35,867 in the first 14 days without any continued effort or time needed"
• "LIVE PROOF: $18,291.75 Effortless Income From ONE Program I Promote"
• "Imagine Seeing Cash In Minutes From Now"

I lived in that mindset for years until around 2005 when I started talking more directly to people who struggling to make sense of all the various internet marketing and telecommuting products being sold online.

Maybe the problem is that for many of us who started with things like Google Adwords in the very early days it was incredibly easy to make money online. I still remember how easy it was to upload hundreds of thousands of keywords to Adwords in the early days and pay 5 cents/click (you can't get away with uploading that many keywords these days without special permission and you definitely will NOT pay 5 cents per click by doing that anymore).

I gradually moved onto trying to impart the idea to people that they needed to think of looking at systems, techniques, and plans as things that might INCREASE or DECREASE their ODDS of success. Obviously there are some aspects of business that can be controlled more than others, but no matter what there will always be elements that are outside your control. That's not an easy concept to impart to a person and get them to hear and appreciate unless they've already had experience using systems in some area of their life where they have had the opportunity to deal with the law of large numbers.

Good poker players and backgammon players deal with this phenomenon all the time and I personally had the rather unusual "fortune" to have hustled backgammon in my teen years in some rather questionable areas of town – significant not only because I was directly experiencing the law of large numbers, but because I was experiencing them in sometimes unusual and stressful circumstances (including having a gun pulled on me, a beer glass smashed on the table I was playing at, and at least one person who tried to run out without paying who was chased down by friends and brought back to pay up).

Now, I'm certainly NOT encouraging gambling, but it does seem strange to me that poker has become such a huge phenomenon  (in the U.S. at least) and yet people seem to be unable or unwilling to make the connection between what it takes to succeed in a game such as that and apply the same principles to business.

I don't know this particular book, but I stumbled onto it when looking to find articles that might offer similar suggestions:

"The Poker MBA: Winning in Business No Matter What Cards You're Dealt" (part of Howard Rothman's Amazon Editorial review is excerpted below):

"Thanks to the song and movie by Kenny "The Gambler" Rogers, most of us now understand that "you've got to know when to hold 'em and know when to fold 'em." This axiom can be applied around a conference table as well as a card table. In The Poker MBA, Jeffrey Gitomer and Greg Dinkin take this concept to the extreme by drawing a world of business advice from the popular pastime. "There is no better training ground for business than a poker game, where your ability to measure risk and make split-second decisions determines whether you cash out a winner," note Dinkin, an MBA-carrying columnist for Card Player magazine, and Gitomer, a writer and sales-and-service consultant."

So I'll close this out for thanking my mom for letting me gamble in my youth. I'll never forget when she said, "well, as long as you're making good money". Of course she didn't know where I was making the money and what kind of places I was hanging out in, but I feel grateful for the opportunity to access a part of my brain during that time that has continued to serve me over the years.