Correspondence

Online reviews and endorsements: CMA letter to marketing professionals

Open letter to marketing departments, marketing agencies and their clients about their obligations under consumer protection law.

• From: Competition and Markets Authority
• Published: 4 April 2016
• Last updated: 11 August 2016 — See all updates

Documents

Open letter to marketing departments, marketing agencies and their clients

PDF, 248 KB, 3 pages

Details

This letter was published prior to the unfair commercial practices provisions of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (DMCC Act) coming into force on 6 April 2025. These provisions contain broadly similar prohibitions against unfair and misleading commercial practices as under the previous legislation, the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 (CPRs).

More detail on the legislative differences between the DMCC Act and the CPRs is available in the technical note.

For further guidance, read Unfair commercial practices. 

For more recent guidance on this topic, read Reviews and social media endorsements: what businesses and content creators must know.

Following the Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) call for information report, we identified some potential misleading practices in relation to online reviews and endorsements.

This letter addresses our concerns in the following 2 areas:

• clearly labelling or identifying paid promotions
• the writing, commissioning and publishing of fake reviews

Published 4 April 2016

Last updated 11 August 2016 + show all updates

1. 11 August 2016

   Updated open letter added.

2. 4 April 2016

   First published.