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Truth in Advertising

Empowering a brand that unravels the truth
Blurry image of Times Square in New York with a white TINA logo centered on top of the image.

Truth in Advertising (TINA) empowers consumers to protect themselves and one another against false advertising and deceptive marketing. With Americans losing billions of dollars to these tactics each year, TINA is a bulwark against a storm of misleading and deceptive brands, fighting back with investigative journalism and legal action to protect consumers and promote honest advertising.

Heading into their 10th year, TINA came to Teal ready to launch “Truth in Advertising 2.0.” Together, we built a fresh brand and a reinvented website that, for the first time, pulls together years of research and information TINA has collected into one place—so patterns of deceptive advertising are clear and bad actors are outed for repeated offenses. In sum, it’s the biggest change since TINA’s founding, and a fresh new chapter in the organization’s potent fight to protect all of us from deceptive marketing.

The hidden truth

Teal reimagined TINA’s visual brand through a collaborative discovery and workshop process. The result: an ownable icon, a primary logo with a maze-like structure that represents the layers of deception TINA navigates to get to the truth. The logo is part of a comprehensive brand system that provides the building blocks for TINA’s bold new visual identity on the website, social channels, and more.

Step by step breakdown of the Truth In Advertising logo icon.
Example advertisement for Truth in Advertising that shows how the red branded frame can be used.

Expanding the Frame

The logo frame serves as a flexible design element for all types of assets, making it easy for TINA to create content that feels cohesive and part of the larger umbrella brand—seen here framing the TINA “Wall of Shame” inductee and noted pillow salesman and conspiracy theorist, Mike Lindell.

Red graphic that says

For more than a decade, TINA has called out the deceivers, misleaders, and repeat offenders on its Wall of Shame. Teal redesigned and rearchitected the Wall to maximize the impact of this club for the best of the worst.

Teal created a vibrant, layered, and branded collage style to represent the areas where TINA works—including multilevel and influencer marketing, “Made in USA” claims, and more.

Row of red, white, and black collage images showing different aspects of deceptive advertising.
Grid of pages from the Truth in Advertising style guide

The truth never sleeps

The TINA team is busy investigating, uncovering deception, publishing ad alerts, and blogging about the latest trends in deceptive marketing. But when TINA came to Teal, this deep and growing archive of content lived in different places, and was hard for users to navigate. So, we created “The Latest,” and brought it all together into a vibrant feed of TINA’s relentless work to uncover and litigate deceptive advertising across the US economy.

Page designs for TINA's ad coverage through its ad alerts, consumer news, and blog

Fighting for honest marketing—brand by brand

For TINA, investigating and calling out deceptive marketing is only step one. The team builds a cadre of evidence against offending companies and takes action: filing regulatory complaints, sending letters to companies, petitioning federal agencies, and leading direct legal action to fight back.

Teal pulled all of these threads together—evidence, legal timelines, news posts, and a class-action tracker—into new Brand Feature pages that are searchable, filterable, and comprehensive. Aggregated together, these new pages tell a complete, and often devastating, story about the patterns of deception by some of our nation’s most well-known companies.

With a new visual identity and website in place, TINA enters their second decade better positioned than ever before to tell their story, take on the deceptive marketers, and stand up for American consumers.

Collage of page designs that showcase the legal work they do against brands and industries

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