16 Years of #Ad: How FTC Disclosure Rules Changed the Game for Marketers
Plus: AI everywhere, Bluesky’s big dreams, Threads’ link glow-up, and a surprise road trip plan for your summer that ends with ice cream. Of course.
We have a MONSTER issue of Social Signals this week! 🔥 It’s packed with platform shifts, historical milestones, and a look at how the future of media, marketing, and tech is unfolding in real time.
We’re celebrating 16 years of FTC disclosure rules with a look at the ad scandals that shaped influencer marketing (hi, Fyre Festival!), diving deep into what Google I/O means for the future of search and AI wearables, and spotlighting how Apple’s smart glasses are entering a red-hot hardware race.
Plus, there’s a surprise road trip anniversary story that turns our pandemic-era family tradition into an example of putting more creative optimism into your life, and a fresh episode of The Cave Project tackling productivity and modern life’s busy trap.
I put a paywall up on the “Social Signals” bulleted roundup portion of this newsletter last week and quite a few of you converted to paid subscriptions. THANK YOU! 💙
If you find this kind of content valuable, consider upgrading your subscription. It helps fund my tech budget for testing and experimenting with new gadgets and services. All in the spirit of helping learn, push, create, and ultimately, work with you in this community to help build a better future. Together.
So… I’m not putting a paywall over that section this week. But if you skim through and find all of this valuable, I appreciate the consideration. And/or, forward this to someone! Share it with your network. And hit reply and email me back with your thoughts. I read and respond to all of them, and it’s my favorite part of putting out all of these signals each week.
Alright, that’s enough. Let’s get into it. And yes, this issue ends with a new home robot that can do your household chores. Bring them on!
Keep going! 🚀✨ -Greg
🕵️♂️ 16 Years of #Ad: How FTC Disclosure Rules Changed the Game for Marketers
In October 2009, the FTC officially declared that online influencers had to play by the same rules as traditional advertisers. A blogger getting a free pair of shoes? That now counted as a “material connection,” and it had to be disclosed.
Fast forward sixteen years, and that simple idea (ahem, tell people when content is sponsored) has evolved into one of the most important (and misunderstood) principles in modern marketing.
We’ve gone from:
“Thanks, Brand!” blog posts,
to… buried hashtags on Instagram,
to… TikToks with tiny “Sponsored” labels you can barely see.
Back in May 2009, Douglas MacMillan at BusinessWeek (now Bloomberg Business) wrote a piece called Blogola: The FTC Takes on Paid Posts that ends this way
The world's more ambitious bloggers like to call themselves 'citizen journalists.' The government is trying to make sure these heralds don't turn into citizen advertisers.
But in 2025, we’re living in a creator economy where citizen advertisers are the norm! And there’s no more guessing. The FTC has updated its Endorsement Guides, rolled out stricter rules on fake reviews, and made it clear: if it looks like an ad, it better say it’s an ad. Plainly and up front.
A Few Flashpoints Worth Remembering:
🛍️ Ann Taylor Loft, 2010: Free gifts to bloggers trigger the FTC’s first inquiry. No fine, but a shot across the bow.
🔥 Fyre Festival, 2017: Celebrities like Kendall Jenner promoted the luxury disaster with no disclosures. No FTC fines, but massive public backlash, and the incident helped spark the FTC’s first mass warning-letter campaign to influencers.
🎮 Machinima, 2015: YouTubers paid to promote Xbox One without disclosure. FTC steps in.
💃 Lord & Taylor, 2016: 50 influencers post the same dress, none disclose. A textbook “don’t.”
🌿 Teami Tea, 2020: Health claims + buried #ads = $15 million lesson.
💸 Kim Kardashian, 2022: SEC fine over undisclosed crypto post.
🪙 Jake Paul, 2023: Fined for failing to disclose crypto endorsements. That guy…
The #Ad Rules Today:
#Ad is good. It’s clear. It’s safe. And it’s TRUE!
However, brands cannot expect consumers to be listening to videos with sound on, so video disclosures also need to appear on screen (not just in the caption).
Platform transparency tools and toggles like “Paid Partnership” should be used, but aren’t enough. These platform disclosure tools don’t equal FTC disclosures, although they do keep your brand compliant with each platform’s disclosure rules.
If your influencer hides the disclosure in the third line of a caption, it’s noncompliant.
Gifts, affiliate links, employee posts, AI avatar, etc…. if there’s a material connection, it must be disclosed.
This goes for sharing client work for us consultants, too. Toss a #client on that bad boy #humblebrag and just avoid any chance it could be perceived as shady stuff.
In short, the FTC has gone from warnings to fines. And honestly, most audiences prefer transparency. It’s not just compliance; it’s trust.
So happy sweet sixteen to the disclosure rules that made the internet a little more honest. 🎂
Now go check your influencer briefs. I’ll wait. -Greg
📊 Chart of the Week:
“If Al development stopped today (and no indication that is happening), we have a couple of decades of figuring out how to integrate it into work, education, & life.” — Ethan Mollick
From 5-10 years of work to absorb these new capabilities to now 20+ years to do so. Your backlog of organizational change just doubled in the past six months. Of course, the punchline is that AI development is most certainly not stopping today. So take a deep breath. We empathize. Everyone’s in the same boat as the AI tide rises.
- via The State of Martech 2025 by Scott Brinker and Frans Riemersma (PDF) (h/t
)🪣 Add a Surprise Weekend Road Trip to Your Summer Bucket List
This weekend marks the five-year anniversary of The Surprise Weekend Road Trip, my creative mechanism to help my family escape the tedium of the pandemic lockdown safely but with some suspense, memories, and ice cream included (never forget the ice cream).
I would secretly choose somewhere within an hour’s drive that was pandemic-safe, pile everyone into the car, give the kids vague clues full of dad jokes about where we were going, and eventually roll up on some kind of random thing that was more or less worth the effort for a BIG SURPRISE designed to mix up the weekend when every day feels the same.
Over the course of 14 months, we hit more than 50 “attractions” within an hour’s drive of our house:
We hit the superlatives: like the world’s largest ball of twine, the world’s largest strawberry, the world’s largest snowman, and had a picnic at the smallest dedicated park in the U.S.
We gawked at giant roadside attractions: like the Jolly Green Giant, the North St. Paul Snowman, and walked through the last remaining covered bridge in the state of Minnesota.
We learned our history: pretended “voting” at the site of the first women to vote in the U.S., learned the history of Native Americans on a hike up Barn Bluff, and we stood on the invisible 45th parallel that cuts across the Twin Cities.
We attended just about any drive-thru experience possible: including the zoo, the state fair, the Renaissance festival, holiday lights, dinosaur adventure, and introduced our puppy to the baby bison at a Minneopa State Park. And LOTS MORE.
Honestly, we pretty much exhausted Roadside America, Atlas Obscura, and my well-worn copy of Off the Beaten Path.
If you think adventures are dangerous, try routine; it's lethal. - Paulo Coelho
PR Week featured our little excursions: PR Week: A vacation during the pandemic?
Who needs a dreamy vacation to Hawaii this year when you can take a trip to see the world’s largest ball of twine or an enormous statue of the Jolly Green Giant?
Those are some of the magical sights Greg Swan has been seeing with his family during the COVID-19 pandemic. He has been organizing surprise road trips for his family each weekend, for 15 weeks now, hitting weird and wonderful destinations within a 60-mile radius of his Minneapolis home.
Then Kendra Pierre-Louis at Medium’s Elemental magazine interviewed me about it for a feature story: Boredom Is Spreading the Coronavirus: People who are rarely bored seem to have an easier time sticking to social distancing behaviors, new research suggests.
Swan’s behavior — creating a plan of activities to do to avoid breaking social distancing — can help even bored people stick with social distancing, according to Bieleke. That’s in part because boredom tends to overlap with a lack of self-control, “basically the ability to control your impulses or your behavior and to do things,” he says. It’s what allows us to do things — like socially distancing — even if we don’t enjoy them…
According to Bieleke, there are ways of encouraging motivation — and it looks a lot like what Swan is doing with his family. “He’s establishing some baseline motivation that you need,” says Bieleke. In other words: socially distance, but make it fun.
When a psychologist with a Ph.D. in boredom says your family's surprise weekend road trip pandemic coping strategy is smart, you genuinely tear up a little.
OH YEAH, and I drove a tank over a car for my 40th birthday lockdown present!
Of course, it was a rough time for lots of people, and we were privileged to be healthy, sheltered, employed, and to have to find creative ways to stay engaged.
And since then, we haven’t needed something to do every weekend, but we’ve kept up the tradition with little surprises here and there. Last summer the kids found themselves at The Quarry Taphouse in Hastings, MN which has a “Rock Range” in the back of the restaurant where you purchase a bucket of rocks and get to throw them at stuff. WHAT A SURPRISE!
If you’re interested in planning your own surprise road trips this summer, here are a few tips from a year of planning these:
Use Roadside America, Atlas Obscura, or the Off the Beaten Path books to find a nearby destination
Do a little internet research in advance about the community, history, and area you’re visiting. And someplace you can get ice cream afterward.
DO NOT TELL where you’re going. Hints are okay, but they must be vague. If you’re using a map app, start the trip before anyone can see the destination so they can’t cheat.
When you get there, make a big deal out of the reveal. Really play it up. Get everyone out of the car immediately to revel in its amazingness.
Take pictures. Take selfies. Text them to family. Post them on social. Brag about your adventure. Capture the memories!
And then go get ice cream. All surprise road trips must end with ice cream. Those are the rules. I should know, because I made them.
Keep going! 🚀✨ - Greg
😅 The Cave Project covers The Busy Trap
Based on my essay The Busy Trap Revisited last week and then Jason DeRusha’s take on his show (that you can stream here at 1:01:08), Jenny Swan and I did a full episode of The Cave Project on the topic. Click below to read and listen!
🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, watch on YouTube, subscribe on Substack to be notified of future episodes, and follow The Cave Project on Instagram and Facebook!
📺 Video of the Week
Google I/O isn’t just for engineers and tech nerds. It’s where Google shows us the future of how people will search, shop, communicate, and interact with content. For marketers and communicators, it’s a front-row seat to the shifts in consumer behavior and the tools we’ll need to stay visible and relevant.
At this year’s I/O, Google confirmed what many of us have been shouting: generative AI is fundamentally reshaping how brands earn attention, build trust, and connect with audiences. Highlights included a new “AI Mode” in Search, deeper and more cited results with “Deep Search,” and “Search Live,” which uses real-time camera input for on-the-go answers. Gemini Live now allows live conversation, screen sharing, and camera interaction, and with Agent Mode, it can complete multi-step tasks like booking travel or summarizing meetings. Add in the early look at smart glasses with built-in AI, and it’s clear: the future of search isn’t a text box, it’s a conversation.
The implications for marketing, PR, and content strategy are massive — this is the time to lean in and rethink how your brand shows up in a world where AI is your audience’s co-pilot. Watch every minute of this 32 minute recap. (h/t
). In fact, watch it with your teams + your friends + your kids.And then show them this video of me testing out the try-on feature (h/t Amir Berenjian), and then try it yourself!
⚡️ Social Signals
Apple’s reported plan to release AI-enabled smart glasses by the end of 2026 isn’t about playing catch-up. It’s a classic example of how Apple approaches emerging tech. The company consistently waits for a category to mature before entering with a polished, consumer-ready product that redefines expectations. We’ve seen it with the iPod, iPhone, MacBook Air, and more recently, the Vision Pro. Now, that strategy is extending to smart glasses.
Meanwhile, at Google I/O this week (you know this because you watched that video further up, right?), Google unveiled its own AI-powered XR glasses, complete with camera input, real-time search capabilities, and integration with Gemini Live — all designed to make the search experience hands-free, visual, and conversational. With OpenAI also working on ambient AI hardware with Jony Ive, the space is heating up fast.
While Meta, Google, and OpenAI are racing to build in public, we can assume Apple is quietly refining its offering for a moment when mainstream adoption is more realistic, prices are more accessible, and the tech finally solves a real user problem. The Apple Vision Pro is a remarkable device, but as a developer unit, its $3,500 price point confused many consumers. Glasses will require a clearer value proposition — and Apple will need to deliver on form, function, and ecosystem in a big way.
I’ve been saying for years that smart glasses are the next evolution beyond smartphones — ambient, assistive, and hands-free. With Apple stepping in, and Google now pushing forward in parallel, that future isn’t just coming. It’s officially on! 🚀
There’s another alternative AI product coming to replace your phone. You may not know Jony Ive’s name, but you definitely know his work — the iPhone, iPad, MacBook, and now, possibly the next generation of AI hardware, as OpenAI acquires his startup to build devices designed to move us beyond screens and into a more ambient, intuitive future. This video with Jony and Sam Altman just having a chat over coffee is a MUST-WATCH. “What it means to use technology can change in a profound way. I hope we can bring some of the delight, wonder and creative spirit that I first felt using an Apple Computer 30 years ago.” --Sam Altman
The Upfronts are the annual showcase where TV networks and streaming platforms pitch their upcoming content slates to advertisers, locking in ad deals ahead of the next broadcast year. Think of it as a mix of red carpet spectacle and billion-dollar business summit. If you're in marketing, media, or brand strategy, paying attention to the Upfronts is a cheat code for understanding where audiences will be, what cultural narratives will dominate, and where your ad dollars can go further in an increasingly fragmented media landscape. My team at FINN partners wrote a great recap in our weekly newsletter that you should subscribe to!!
Threads is finally giving links a little more love, making it easier for creators and publishers to drive traffic with better visibility, analytics, and up to five bio links. It’s not a full algorithmic embrace yet, but it’s a clear signal: Meta wants Threads to be more than just vibes: it wants to be valuable.
One year after the launch of Google’s AI Overviews, publishers are rethinking their SEO playbooks as traditional strategies lose traction, with many seeing significant drops in click-through rates and shifting focus toward branded search, exclusive content, and alternative traffic sources… all while preparing for the larger disruption on the horizon from Google’s upcoming AI Mode, reports Sara Guaglione in Digiday: One year in: SEO lessons from publishers after Google’s AI Overview.
Last week Roblox broke another record, with 16.4 million concurrent users (aka more people than the entire population of Cambodia. For a period of time, a single Roblox game had 5X more players than all of Fortnite and that wasn't even during a holiday, just a regular weekend! Experts like James Purell thinks once school is out this summer the platform will hit 20M platform CCU with more games joining the million-player club.
The Onion officially launched America’s Finest Creative Agency, a new intenal agency offering that brings its signature satirical sharpness to brands. They’ll do copywriting to social-first video and aren’t worried about AI because, as CMO Leila Brillson told Marketing Brew, “AI isn’t very funny.” We’ll see!
The SXSW keynote interview with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber was one of my favorites from 2025. In this feature article from Wired, she shares how she views the platform not just as a Twitter alternative, but as the foundation for a decentralized social web powered by the open-source AT Protocol. It’s one where users own their identity, developers build freely, and moderation is distributed across a customizable, interoperable network of apps designed to outgrow even Bluesky itself. I’m bullish on this in the long-term. We have to get past explaining to people what a fediverse is, though.
Substack of the Week: 13 Signs You Used ChatGPT To Write That via
Podcast of the Week: The brilliant folks at
launched a podcast with Sean Garret and Allison Braley. First episodes are up now, including one with Kevin Roose!Long Read of the Week: Why Are There So Many ‘Alternative Devices’ All of a Sudden?
Amazing Music Video of the Week: Music in a shell via Moritz Simon Geist.
AI Problem We Didn’t Need to Solve of the Week: We’ve done it! We taught AI how to play and beat Pokemon. Finally!
TikTok of the Week: Non-consensual minions movie marathon on an airplane.
Reel of the Week: If you’ve been wondering where the robot that can do your chores is, it might be here sooner than you think!
Keep going! 🚀✨
Greg