Resveratrol: The Hard Sell on Anti-Aging

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It is true Oprah and others have talked excitedly about resveratrol. Clips of these animated discussions are sometimes embedded in the Internet ads and then linked to specific products the celebrities never mention. One ad, for example, gushes: "Resveratrol Ultra is one of the most popular products. It has been featured over and over again on 60 Minutes, the Dr. Oz show, CNN, NBC and The New York Times." (It has not.)

Spokespeople for CBS (CBS), Winfrey, Oz, and Ray say their legal teams are pursuing the companies making false claims. Winfrey has posted a notice on her Web site telling fans that neither she nor Oz has endorsed any product or "online solicitation." Barbara Walters—who is seen in many of the ads schmoozing with Sinclair at his Harvard lab during last year's TV special—is not happy, either. "Bottom line: We don't like it. We try to stop it. We'll keep fighting it," says Jeffrey Schneider, senior vice-president at ABC News.

Even people who should know better have been snookered by the fake celebrity endorsements. Himani Vejandla, a PhD student in physiology at West Virginia University, ordered what she thought was a free sample of Resveratrol Ultra in June. She was reading a medical article on WebMD (WBMD) when the ad popped up, and she was impressed that experts such as Sinclair and Oz supposedly endorsed the product. But she got suspicious when the shipment arrived with no information about how to return the pills. Then FWM charged her $87.13—not once, but twice. When she complained, the company returned the first payment, but she had to file a claim with her bank to try to recover the second one after FWM's customer service people told her they had no record of the charge. "They're literally ripping people off," Vejandla says.

Florida's Better Business Bureau (BBB), which has also been inundated with complaints about FWM, slapped the company with an F rating. And the Florida Attorney General's Economic Crimes Div. in West Palm Beach has launched an investigation.

FWM's Weiss declined to comment on the investigation. He says the customer service gripes are "older complaints" and that the one-year-old company now has 24/7 phone and Web support. As for the BBB rating, he says: "We respond to every inquiry that comes from them. Their Web site isn't accurate." Regardless of Weiss' responses, says Michael Galvin, a spokesman for the BBB in Miami, "We have serious concerns about his sales techniques. He'll still have an F."

Holes in the Screen

Google has not been effective at screening out fake celebrity endorsements disseminated via its popular AdWords program. Through AdWords, companies bid on the placement of their promotions in searches and sponsored links and pay only when Web surfers click on their ads. The program accounted for most of Google's $22 billion in revenues last year. On June 15, Google formally allowed companies to cite registered trademarks in ads, including celebrity names they don't own. The point was to enable legitimate commerce: An online shoe store, for example, can attract traffic by using trademarks such as Nike (NKE).

Even so, Google says it tries to block ads that make false claims and push credit-card schemes. It recently banned false celebrity endorsements, too. The company uses automated and manual processes to weed these out. When asked why so many are getting through, a spokeswoman says: "We're doing our best."

Harvard's Sinclair wishes Glaxo, or perhaps lawyers representing the celebrities, would do more to try to stop the ads. But he may actually have opened the door to the abuse last year when he joined the scientific advisory board of Shaklee, in Pleasanton, Calif. Shaklee sells Vivix Cellular Anti-Aging Tonic, which contains resveratrol. Sinclair says he quit the post when other companies started using his name and likeness. He's opposed, he says, "to any use of my name to sell products."

Weintraub is a senior writer for BusinessWeek's Science & Technology department.

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