The fine print that turns a good ad into a sanctionable one

Two campaigns can carry the same offer, the same budget and the same supervisor. One runs for a year. The other is pulled in three weeks because of eleven words in a caption and a disclaimer nobody could see on a phone. In 2023, FCA interventions led to roughly 10,000 financial promotions being amended or withdrawn by authorised firms. Very few of those were lies. Most were claims nobody could substantiate on request, or true claims placed where the qualification did not travel with them.

Which bodies supervise your communications, and which of your outputs count as regulated promotions at all, is settled by the foundations lesson of this module. This one works a level down: the sentence, the figure, the star rating, the footnote.

Where the sanction lives

Regulators rarely sanction a concept. They sanction a line. Three tests decide whether a line survives contact with a supervisor:

• Substantiation: can you produce, within days, the document behind the claim?
• Prominence: does the qualification sit with the claim, in the same view, at comparable weight?
• Standalone: does the item comply on its own, without the reader clicking through, scrolling, or having read last month's post?

The third test catches sophisticated teams. The FCA's finalised guidance on financial promotions on social media (FG24/1, March 2024) is explicit that each communication must stand up by itself. A risk warning parked in a linked landing pagelanding pageA standalone web page built for a single campaign goal, designed to maximise conversions by removing distractions and focusing visitors on one action.View full definition →, a pinned comment or slide four of a carousel does not repair slide one. Truncated posts, expiring stories and cropped previews are the firm's problem, not the platform's.

The ICAEW Code of Ethics reaches the same place from a different direction. Professional behaviour prohibits exaggerated claims about the services offered, the qualifications held or the experience gained, and prohibits disparaging references or unsubstantiated comparisons with the work of others. An accountancy firm's ad can contain no factual error at all and still breach that.

The four claim types that generate the files

1. Performance and outcome claims

The FCA's past performance rules are prescriptive in a way creative teams routinely underestimate: complete 12-month periods covering at least five years (or the full life of the product if shorter), the reference period and data source stated, the figures not the most prominent feature of the communication, an explicit warning that they refer to the past, and a currency warning where returns are earned in another currency.

Worked logic. "Clients saw average returns of 8% last year" is not a claim you can fix with a footnote. It needs the period, whether the figure is before or after fees and charges, the source, and the risk warning in the same field of view. Drop one element and the sentence is a candidate for withdrawal, even where the 8% is accurate.

For law firms, ABA Model Rule 7.1 bans false or misleading communications, and its commentary goes further than most marketers expect: a truthful statement is misleading if it omits a fact needed to keep the communication as a whole from misleading, or if it creates unjustified expectations about results. Case results in advertising are the standard trap, which is why several state bars require language to the effect that prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.

The edge case worth thinking through: a litigation team advertising a "98% success rate" where settlements count as wins and matters dropped before filing never enter the denominator. The arithmetic holds. The claim about what a new client should expect does not, and a bar regulator will read it as the second thing.

2. Fee and price claims

Price copy fails on exclusions rather than on the headline number. A "from £750" conveyancing fee that excludes VAT, search fees, Land Registry charges and the bank transfer fee is four omissions, and the engagement letter arriving three weeks later does not cure the advert. "No win, no fee" without the success-fee percentage and the circumstances in which the client still pays is the same defect in a different practice area.

Fees also change what a performance number means, which is why the SEC's Marketing Rule for investment advisers only permits gross performance where net performance appears with equal prominence and over the same period. Treat fee treatment as part of the claim, not as an annotation to it.

A quiet failure mode: stale pricing. A published fee schedule is a live promotion for as long as it is reachable. Firms raise fees in January and update the site in April, and for those three months every visitor sees a price the firm will not honour.

Four questions for any fee line:

• Is this the total, or a starting price, and does the wording make that unmistakable?
• Are VAT, disbursements and third-party costs named in the same asset?
• If a comparison is implied ("cheaper than the high street"), what is the like-for-like basis and when was it last checked?
• Who owns the date on this page?

3. Testimonials, reviews and rankings

Any material connection behind a testimonial (payment, discount, fee-sharing, an employment relationship) has to be visible to the reader. The US Federal Trade Commission's rule on fake and paid-for consumer reviews took effect in October 2024; in the UK, the unfair commercial practices provisions of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 came into force in April 2025 and cover commissioning or hosting fake reviews. Solicited five-star reviews from staff members' relatives are now an enforcement category, not an embarrassment.

Rankings need attributionattributionA framework for assigning credit to the touchpoints that contributed to a conversion, so you can measure which channels and interactions actually drive results.View full definition → to be substantiated at all. "Top 100 firm" without the naming of the list, the year and the category is unverifiable by construction, and ABA Model Rule 7.2 limits claims implying certification as a specialist to certifications from an approved organisation, named in the communication. If the award was paid for, or entered by nomination only, that changes what the badge can be said to prove.

4. Comparisons, superlatives and urgency

Unsubstantiated comparison is the claim type where accountancy and audit firms get caught, because ICAEW ethics prohibits it directly, without needing any consumer to complain. "More independent", "more rigorous than the Big Four approach": there is no document behind those.

Urgency is the other half. The FCA banned incentives to invest in high-risk investments, including refer-a-friend and new-joiner bonuses, from February 2023, and requires prescribed risk-warning wording that firms may not soften. Outside financial promotion rules, the same scrutiny follows countdown timers and "limited places" framing aimed at audiences under stress: business owners facing insolvency, families arranging probate, elderly clients considering estate planning. The audience's condition changes what a legitimate scarcity claim looks like.

Testing one line before it ships

Build a substantiation file rather than a rulebook summary. One row per claim, carrying the claim exactly as written, the source document, the date it was verified, the expiry date, and the assets it appears in. Two consequences follow. Claims with no expiry date get flagged, which is how stale pricing and last year's ranking surface. And when a supervisor asks, the answer takes an afternoon rather than a fortnight.

Edge cases worth logging before they bite:

• A partner's personal LinkedIn post repeating a firm claim. FG24/1 confirms that individuals, including influencers, can commit a criminal offence by communicating an unapproved financial promotion.
• Third-party lead generators writing their own copy about your service. Since February 2024, an authorised firm needs a specific FCA permission to approve promotions for unauthorised persons, so the informal favour of "we'll sign off their landing page" is no longer available by default.
• Translated and localised copy, where a risk warning gets shortened to fit a design template.
• One bad sentence in a bio template. Replicated across 40 adviser profiles, it is 40 promotions to remediate, plus the directory listings and cached pages you do not control.

A useful reference for reviewing your own promotional checklist against a real regulator's framework is the FCA's guidance on financial promotions: FCA Financial Promotions and Adverts guidance.

🎬 [VIDEO: "How the FCA Regulates Financial Promotions" - youtube.com - search this title on the FCA's official YouTube channel for a regulator-produced explainer on financial promotion rules and common failures]

What a bad claim costs after the campaign stops

The media spend is the small number. A withdrawn claim survives in screenshots, syndicated directory profiles, PDFs on other people's servers and the search snippet that still shows the old wording weeks later, which is why remediation is measured in sites you do not own. Mid-flight withdrawal also strands committed media and leaves the sales team with a proposition it can no longer describe the way it was trained to.

The second-order cost is credibility with your own supervisor. A firm that has had one promotion amended gets read more closely on the next, and closer reading finds more. Claim discipline is cheaper as a habit than as a remedy.

Key takeaways

• Sanctions attach to specific lines, not to campaigns: substantiation, prominence and standalone compliance are the three tests every claim has to pass.
• Performance figures carry mandatory companions (period, source, fee basis, risk warning), and a true number placed without them is still a defect.
• Fee claims fail on exclusions and on staleness far more often than on the headline price; a published fee schedule is a live promotion until it is taken down.
• Testimonials, reviews and rankings need disclosed connections and named sources; unattributed badges and unsubstantiated comparisons breach ICAEW ethics and ABA Model Rule 7.1 without anyone having to be deceived.
• Keep a substantiation file with expiry dates per claim, and treat partner posts, lead generators and bio templates as promotions, because regulators do.