• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, August 11, 2009

In what appears to be its first decision involving pay-per-post Web marketing, a unit of the National Advertising Review Council said today that marketers should disclose when they have paid consumers to write reviews.

The case dealt with several diet sites owned by the company Urban Nutrition, which sells products like Serenity, marketed as a "non-prescription mood enhancement," and MiracleBurn, a dietary supplement.

Urban Nutrition paid people $20 each to post write-ups on sites like WeKnowDiets.com -- and then allegedly presented the critiques as independent reviews. That practice spurred a competitor to complain to the Electronic Retailing Self-Regulation (an NARC unit) that Urban Nutrition was utilizing its forums "to overtly market its own products while it improperly criticizes its competition," according to the decision. For instance, the competitor alleged, WeKnowDiets.com's "Most Popular Products & Programs" section prominently lists MiracleBurn, but the site operators didn't disclose that they own it.

The Electronic Retailing Self-Regulation Program found that Urban Nutrition's failure to reveal its connection to the site might have left users with "the lasting impression of the inflated popularity and superiority of the marketer's products."

It seems obvious that an advertiser who pays people for write-ups shouldn't act as if such reviews are independent. At the same time, this type of shilling probably happens a lot more often than many people realize.

Here, the potential problems with Urban Nutrition came to light because a competitor complained. But there are almost certainly many paid "reviews" on the Web that haven't been investigated. Not yet, anyway.

That situation might soon change, given that the Federal Trade Commission and officials like New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo are taking an interest in phony reviews and other forms of problematic online ads. Meantime, Urban Nutrition has agreed to make more disclosures, according to the opinion.