In September last year, the ASA undertook a three week monitoring exercise to review the Instagram accounts of 122 UK-based influencers to assess whether advertising content was being properly disclosed. That involved assessing over 24,000 Instagram Stories including posts, IGTV and reels to check compliance rates. The advertising rules apply across all platforms and non-broadcast media but this monitoring exercise focussed on posts on Instagram because complaints to the ASA about Influencer ad disclosure tend to relate to this particular platform.

Extensive advice, training and easy-to-understand resources have been provided to help the influencer marketing community and brands understand their responsibilities under the ad rules. Despite this, the ASA found that nearly one in four of the Stories it assessed were advertising, but only 35% of them were clearly labelled and obviously identifiable as such. The level of non-compliance is unacceptable.

In summary, the ASA found:

• Inconsistent disclosure across Stories – when a piece of ad content spans a number of consecutive Stories, unless it’s absolutely clear that this is part of the same posting, each Story must be disclosed as an ad

• Inconsistent disclosure across Stories, IGTV, Reels, posts – we noted instances where a post would be accurately disclosed as an ad but a corresponding Story was not

• Visibility of ad labels – where Stories were labelled as ads, we noted labels were sometimes in a small font, obscured by the platform architecture or otherwise difficult to spot; mainly due to being in a very similar colour to the background of the Story where it was placed

• Affiliate content is still an ad – we noted the use of #affiliate or #aff with no additional upfront disclosure; those labels are not likely to be enough on their own to disclose to users the advertising nature of the content

• Own-brand ads – Influencers should not rely on bios or past posts to make it clear to consumers that they are connected to a product

Research shows the difficulty that consumers have in distinguishing certain types of online ads from surrounding content. And that’s evidenced by complaints to the ASA: 2020 saw a 55% increase on 2019 in complaints received about influencers from across platforms, from 1,979 to 3,144 individual complaints. 61% of those complaints in 2020 were about ad disclosure on Instagram.

The ad rules are clear: it must be obvious to consumers before they read, ‘like’ or otherwise interact with a social media post if what they are engaging with is advertising. In most cases, the use of #ad (or similar) is the clearest way of communicating the commercial nature of social media content. Alternatively, a platform’s own disclosure tools, such as Instagram’s Paid Partnership tool, can also help to distinguish advertising from other content.

The ASA has contacted all the influencers, as well as a number of brands, and put them on notice that if future spot checks the ASA carries out on any platform reveal problems we will take enforcement action. That might include promoting their non-compliance on a dedicated page on our website, promoting their non-compliance through our own targeted paid search ads and working directly with the platforms and the Competition and Markets Authority on further enforcement action.

ASA Chief Executive, Guy Parker said:
“There’s simply no excuse not to make clear to the public when positive messages in posts have been paid-for by a brand. While some influencers have got their houses in order, our monitoring shows how much more there is to do. We’ve given influencers and brands fair warning. We’re now targeting our follow-up monitoring and preparing for enforcement action.”