Compliance
Testimonials and endorsements are permitted now, subject to disclosure, oversight, and agreements. The permission is real; the conditions are not paperwork.
For decades, advisors operated under a flat prohibition. The modernized advertising rule replaced it with a conditional permission: testimonials and endorsements are allowed, subject to disclosure, oversight, and above a de minimis amount, written agreements.
The permission is real. The conditions are not optional, and firms have been penalized for treating them as paperwork.
Disclosure, clearly and prominently. Whether the person is a client, whether they were compensated, and a brief statement of any material conflicts of interest. Buried in a footnote is not prominent.
Oversight. The firm must have a reasonable basis for believing the advertisement complies. In practice this means somebody reviews and somebody keeps the record.
Written agreements and disclosure where compensation is involved. Compensation includes more than cash — a discount, a gift, or a sweepstakes entry counts.
Disqualification. There are people whose endorsement you may not pay for.
Online reviews. A third-party review site is not automatically your advertisement — until you solicit, curate, incentivize, or republish it. Sharing a favorable review moves it firmly into your advertising.
Social media. Endorsements from people connected to the firm, comments on your own posts, and reshares are all foreseeable and all reachable by the rule.
Cherry-picking. Showing the good and suppressing the rest is a separate problem, and it exists independently of whether each individual item was disclosed correctly.
Decide deliberately whether your firm will use testimonials at all. Many firms conclude that the marginal benefit does not justify the ongoing oversight, and that is a legitimate answer — provided it is a decision, documented, rather than an absence of one.
If you will use them, build the process before the first one: who reviews, what disclosure appears, where the record is kept, and what happens when a client posts something you did not ask for.
Questions this did not answer? Ask them directly — that is what the twenty minutes is for.
Schedule a call to see for yourself