New guidelines requesting social media influencers to use ‘#ad’ and ‘#gifted’ labels in their posts have been jointly launched by the Competition & Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC) and the Advertising Standards Authority of Ireland (ASAI). The CCPC, which is Ireland’s consumer watchdog, and the ASAI, which acts as the self-regulatory body for the advertising industry, said the use of any other labels would only confuse consumers.
#Ad should be used in the case of paid promotions, while #gifted is for posts about items received for free and on an unsolicited basis from brands and their marketing agencies. Abbreviations such as ‘sp’ for ‘sponsored’ are not always readily understood by consumers. The new guidelines coincide with a month-long review or ‘sweep’ of influencer content conducted by the European Commission and State authorities, such as the CCPC.
The guidelines were developed following research around the use of eye-tracking tech deployed to monitor the gaze of 30 Instagram users. A survey of 500 frequent users of the Meta-owned social media platform was also conducted. The new hashtags must be instantly visible to consumers. Posts about influencers’ own brands must be labelled as advertising and #ad should feature instead of labels like #IWorkWith and #OwnBrand.
Pictured are Kevin O’Brien, CCPC and Orla Twomey, chief executive, ASAI
