5.5 Advertising INSTRUCTOR SCRIPT: Autobrokers must comply with specific advertising rules. When advertising your brokering services, you must clearly identify yourself as a broker. You cannot advertise in a way that makes consumers believe you are selling vehicles from your own inventory when you’re actually brokering vehicles from other dealers’ inventories. Transparency is the key principle. You cannot advertise a specific vehicle at a specific price unless you have a written agreement with a selling dealer to provide that vehicle at that price. Advertising a vehicle you don’t have and can’t guarantee is misleading. If a customer responds to your ad, comes to your dealership, and you can’t deliver the advertised vehicle at the advertised price, you’ve engaged in deceptive advertising — and potentially bait-and-switch tactics, which we’ll cover in Section 9. All advertising by autobrokers must include your dealer license number and disclose that you are a broker. This applies to all advertising channels — newspaper, online, radio, television, social media, third-party listing sites. If you run an ad that says “2024 Toyota Camry — $28,000” without disclosing that you’re a broker and that the vehicle is at another dealer’s location, that’s a problem.