Wanted to bring this to the group because I know we are not the only agency dealing with this and I think it is a conversation the tier 2 community needs to have openly.

Since the FTC noise has gotten louder our dealer clients have been coming to us with compliance questions that we are simply not equipped to answer. And I mean that genuinely, not as a dodge. We are getting asked to review ad copy for legal exposure, to make calls on whether a specific fee disclosure is sufficient, to essentially tell them whether their current campaigns will survive regulatory scrutiny. That is not advertising strategy. That is legal advice and we cannot give it.

The problem is that dealers trust us. We are their closest vendor relationship in a lot of cases. They call us before they call their attorney and honestly before they call their OEM rep. So when they come to us scared and looking for reassurance we are in this uncomfortable position of wanting to help a client we care about while knowing that anything we say that sounds like legal guidance could create real liability for our agency.

What we have done internally is put together a clear boundary statement that our account teams use when these conversations come up. We are happy to implement changes, we are happy to update templates, we are happy to pull anything a client flags as a concern. But we are not the ones telling them whether something is compliant. That call has to come from their attorney and we document that we said so.

What I genuinely want to know is what other tier 2 agencies are doing with this. Are you referring clients to specific outside counsel who understand automotive advertising? Are your OEM partners giving you any updated creative guidance that addresses compliance proactively? Are you seeing dealers actually follow through and get legal reviews done or are they just venting and then going back to running the same campaigns?

Because right now it feels like we are sitting in the middle of a problem that nobody has fully figured out how to hand off cleanly and the dealers who need real answers are not necessarily getting them fast enough.
Would genuinely appreciate hearing how other shops are navigating this.