Time to clean up the “influencer” market
The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) says it intends to crack down on paid celebrity posts online by so-called influencers to promote certain brands or products without them appearing to be advertisements.
The popularity of influencer marketing, along with the development of new opportunities to develop influence on the social media, is generating an environment in which brands are throwing money at high visibility people of all kinds who they believe can sway their followers. The FTC is concerned about the lack of transparency, given that brands are not explicitly named and effectively passing off advertisements as though they were simply messages.
In reality, this is nothing new: a tweet may only have room for 140 characters, but when somebody is being paid to promote a product, it should be clear that this is the case, regardless of the medium. If a brand pays a bunch of people to promote its goods or services, then it cannot ask them to pretend that their message is somehow spontaneous. An advertising campaign is an advertising campaign.
The FTC has begun fining offenders such as Warner Bros, which paid a number of online influencers, among them the amazingly popular PewDiePie, who has more than 47 million followers, for appearing in a video that reviews the video game Shadow of Mordor positively. Warner Bros provided PewDie Pie with instructions on how to promote the game and which bits to highlight. Similarly, upscale New York department store Lord & Taylor, paid 50 supposed fashion influencers to create insertions on Instagram of one of its dresses, again without saying that they were being paid to do so or had been given the dress in question as a gift. The FTC says that being given free stuff is the same as being paid and should be declared.
It says that posts that are part of a paid campaign must be clearly indicated as such at the top of a post and not hidden among other hashtags. On Instagram, the use of the #ad hashtag has grown, with more than 300,000 photographs and videos using it in July, compared to 120,000 for the same month in 2015.
On sites like Snapchat, where there is no specific space for a hashtag and videos are kept short, meaning that the FTC will act on a case by case basis, again depending on how clearly a post is flagged up as an advertisement.
The problem here is that a lot of brands are going about this the wrong way. Rather than trying to create relationships with people who might have some persuasive power in certain circles, many brands are simply applying brute metrics or using agencies whose interests are unclear, setting up tricky campaigns, often based on erroneous parameters.
There has always been a market for brands with more money than sense, and the appearance of these new breeds of influencers is, in a surprisingly high number of cases, just one more example. In the United States, the FTC’s move should be welcomed as a bid to impose some order on an environment very much in need of it.
(En español, aquí)
