The inherent disparity between TV and influencer marketing regulation needs to be fixed
Recently, the ASA put out guidelines which, in their words “help social influencers stick to the rules by making clear when their posts are ads.”
While I welcome anything that will help drive transparency in the market, I think there is a massive double standard at play when you compare theose to the product placement rules.
Influencer marketing gets unfairly singled out because it’s a new media, which isn’t helped by the fact the mainstream media seem to blow every little story out of proportion and give it unwarranted negative exposure.
Add to this that we have been told on good authority that the amount of complaints to the ASA about TV product placement absolutely dwarfs those of influencer marketing, and I start to wonder why the Product Placement rules have not been changed since their introduction in 2011.
The regs basically say that in any TV programme with product placement, a “P” logo will appear at the beginning of the programme and with the credits.
Here are the rules as stated on the Ofcom website:
“Product placement is when a company pays a TV channel or a programme-maker to include its products or brands in a programme. So, for example, a fashion company might pay for a presenter to wear its clothes during a programme, or a car manufacturer might pay for a character to mention one of its cars in a scene in a drama.
"Ofcom's rules on product placement stipulate that it "must be signalled clearly, by means of a universal neutral logo ... at the beginning of the programme in which the placement appears; when the programme recommences after commercial breaks; and at the end of the programme".
Research from TRP Surveys, a UK-wide media survey run by media research agency TRP Research, shows that 8 out of 10 people don't actually understand what the TV product placement symbol is for and only 27% of the UK public have noticed product placement in a UK TV show. But has there been a drive to raise this number? Nope. Nothing has changed.
And this is because, as stated above, there is a double standard when the regulatory bodies look at a traditional media such as TV and a new media, such as influencer marketing. Which is strange to me, because in both cases consumers either don’t seem to know advertising is happening, or care if it is.
Regulators often come from the position that the consumer doesn’t really understand the inner workings of the medium they are engaging with, but we have all been seeing ads in our content pretty much since the first day our eyes and psyches were exposed to the content we consume. You don’t read a magazine and get shocked when a double page spread ad for a suit or perfume covers the next page you turn to. So why is this any different?
I believe the sensible view of this is that if we were all transparent anyway (and there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that not being transparent impacts negatively on the business) and stopped blindly repeating the mistakes our forebears made in traditional media, we wouldn’t need these rules and we could govern ourselves.
But until that day there needs to be a review of the product placement regulations.
Ian Samuel is the chief commercial officer at Buzzoole