Myleene Klass suffered a trifecta of rulings against her this week by the UK advertising regulator.
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Myleene Klass suffered a trifecta of rulings against her by the Advertising Standards Authority this week.
Two of the rulings focus on the singer and TV presenter promoting her own products – in this case books and bikinis.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) recently issued new guidance for influencers. One section explicitly deals with influencers and their own brands, explaining “if creators own (in full, co-own or in part), or are employed by a brand and use their social media account to promote its products, they must make this known and clearly label these posts as ads”. Klass didn’t. She was clobbered for it.
The former Hear’Say pop star also fell foul of the regulator for failing to declare her ads were ads when promoting the shoe brand Skechers. The new CMA guidance reminds us that it’s businesses as well as influencers that can be held accountable for misleading customers.
Promotional posts should clearly display that they’re ads, using #Ad or #Advert, and by staying well clear of more ambiguous hashtags such as #gifted, #sponsored, #affiliate, #collab, #PRHaul, or phrases such as ‘Funded by’, ‘PR Stay’, ‘In association with’, ‘made possible by’, or ‘ownbrand’.
As well as being clearly labelled as an ad, it must be obvious that a post is an ad as soon as anyone engages with the content. That means that for carousels or sequences - whether videos or photos - where viewers can access individual posts, each item that containing promotional messaging must also be labelled.
The good folk at Performance Marketing World asked me to contribute to an article exploring the Myleene Klass case and the CMA guidelines. You can read that here.
This article first appeared on November 09 as a column for the Influencer Marketing Digest - the weekly newsletter I am commissioned to write for Fourth Floor. You can sign up to receive the newsletter here.
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