• Brandweek, Monday, November 2, 2009 12:15 PM

Robert Klara spent a day at the busy National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus, where its eight attorneys have one of the "most powerful and influential jobs" in marketing because they "tell brands what they can and cannot say." The NAD's caseload -- 300 complaints or so to investigate -- is up 30% over last year, which itself was a 40% percent jump over 2007.

"Brands send their marketers, lawyers and scientists to come with the facts -- and if I can keep the lawyers from shutting them up, we can get somewhere," says NAD executive director Andrea C. Levine. "It gets very interesting in this room."

Levine, who has been the NAD's director for 13 years, is a former assistant attorney general for New York. Klara writes that her "legal experience, firecracker personality and irrepressible sense of humor forms the intellectual glue that has held the NAD together through cases often stultifying in their tedium."

The NAD is not without its critics, who claim that it's a toothless and reactive arm of the ad industry. It's fine for when one marketer has issues with the claim of a competitor, says Bruce Silverglade, legal director for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, but it does not "tackle the tough consumer-protection issues raised in deceptive advertisements."

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