The acronym FTC stands for the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC is the federal agency, the main aim of which is to protect consumers and competition, “preventing anticompetitive, deceptive, and unfair business practices through law enforcement, advocacy, and education without unduly burdening legitimate business activity” (Federal Trade Commission, n.d., para. 1). One of the means through which the FTC protects consumers and competition is governing advertising. The current paper presents two points why advertising should be controlled by this federal agency.
First of all, the FTC established a set of rules which companies should follow while developing their advertising campaigns. For instance, the FTC obliges the producers of wool and textile products to inform the audience of Internet ads and catalogs of these products country of origin. The sellers of jewelry are forced to inform potential consumers whether the gemstones are natural or synthetic and whether accessories are produced of sterling gold and silver or not. From this, it could be inferred that through these regulations, the FTC protects consumers from misinformation and ensures that they could trust the ads that they see.
The second reason why the FTC should govern advertising is that it is a way to guarantee fair competition for the producers of goods and services. More precisely, the companies are prohibited from presenting deliberately false information in advertisings. Therefore, under no circumstances could a company claim in its ads that specific good or service is much better than it is in reality. Therefore, the FTC ensures that goods or services of low quality would not be passed for high-quality ones. Besides, the fairness of the competition is determined through the prohibition to emphasize the weak sides of competitors and name other brands in the advertisements.
Reference
Federal Trade Commission. (n.d.). About the FTC.