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Practical guides for people who write ad copy in regulated categories. Each one cites its sources so you can check them yourself. For a verdict on an exact wording, the rule reference is the other half of this site.
Every entry here is a sentence you will hear in any affiliate channel, followed by one line from the instrument that says otherwise. Eleven beliefs, ten guides, no interpretation of ours in between.
Free-trial and auto-renewal copy is governed by three rules on three different clocks: one vacated in court, one written but not commenced, and one that has applied unchanged since 2005 — which is the only one that can be enforced against you this morning.
Most operators use the three words interchangeably and then appeal to the wrong place. They are three separate systems with three separate consequences — and the third one sends no notification at all, because nothing was violated.
Fake urgency is unusual: almost every advertising breach needs someone to interpret an impression, and this one needs a reload. Three of the four markets we cover complete the breach on falsity alone, and in one of them it is a criminal offence.
Every market makes you say it is an ad. They disagree about the words, the position and who has to prove what — and the disagreements are what catch an operator running one creative across borders.
The affiliate disclosure duty takes one sentence to state and is almost always failed on placement instead. The regulator has published worked examples of the failures, and four of them describe what a first-time publisher actually does.
Four markets agree that an endorsement is held to the same standard as the advertiser’s own copy. Where they have moved recently is on disclaimers and on paying for a verdict.
Two incompatible models sit behind benefit claims. One asks whether you can support the claim; the other asks whether the wording is on a list. Evidence answers the first and is irrelevant to the second.
Operators go looking for the list of permitted health claims, find it, and copy a sentence out of it. The list exists — but an entry is a sentence bound to conditions, and two of the register’s three statuses forbid the claim outright.
Most compliance advice is about what you say. These rules are about what a reader concludes, and on weight loss the European bar is the higher one — which is the opposite of what most operators expect.
A rejection names a policy category, never the sentence that tripped it. The reason is that the platform and the law are reading different halves of your copy — and the platform half is the same text in every market you run.
Guides explain the rule. The checker tells you what your own wording does with it.
Check your copy