Social media influencers cause surge of complaints to advertising watchdog
New rules dictating how promotional content is posted to social media have resulted in a surge of complaints to the advertising watchdog and have caught out some of New Zealand’s most popular influencers.
In September, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) set out guidelines influencers must follow when posting to social media, including clearly identifying promotional social media posts as advertising content.
Influencers are increasingly being used by advertisers to promote brands, goods and services to a wider, and potentially more targeted, audience.
Advertisers pay influencers to promote their brand on social media or provide influencers with free goods and services in the hope they post about it.
In the first three months of this year, the ASA published 28 decisions relating to complaints about influencers. In 2020, it published three (two were settled and one was upheld). Of this year’s decisions, 23 were settled, three were upheld and the chair ruled the complaints board had no jurisdiction to consider the other two complaints.
Chief executive Hilary Souter said the ASA had experienced a 78 per cent increase in complaints compared with the same time last year, mostly due to an increase in complaints about influencers.
It received about 200 queries and complaints about influencer advertising since it published draft guidelines on labelling influencer ad content in June, Souter said. ‘‘We have processed 45 formal complaints about influencer ad identification since January and 28 of those have been settled, with influencers acknowledging the lack of an ad label was an error.’’ The remainder were still in the process.
The published decisions this year have included complaints about posts from the likes of former Black Sticks player Gemma McCaw (settled); late broadcaster Paul Holmes’ daughter Millie Elder-Holmes (settled); food reviewer Albert Cho (settled); Boss Babes personality Edna Swart (upheld) and weight loss sensation Simone Anderson (two upheld, one settled).
While there were no monetary fines for breaching advertising standards, Souter said, the fact that rule breakers were named on public record and sometimes had media exposure over the breach was a harsh penalty in itself.
‘‘Their brand is their name, so they can’t divorce the two.’’
Souter said there was no doubt
the new guidelines were the reason for the influx of complaints. The ASA had not increased its seven staff but had instead become more efficient in triaging and processing complaints, Souter said.
No monitoring of social media was required of the ASA because influencer followers were so good at alerting it to breaches.
‘‘People are pretty hyper vigilant without us having to do monitoring at this stage.’’ When contacted by the ASA most influencers were quick to rectify a post and the complaint was settled.
Souter said that last year the ASA dealt with 1500 complaints about nearly 600 ads.
Influencers in Australia have recently been pulled up for advertising breaches there after new rules were introduced in February. Breaking the rules could result in an influencer breaching Australian consumer law. The maximum fine per breach of consumer law is A$500,000 (NZ$539,000) for an individual and A$10 million for a business.
In New Zealand, Inland Revenue also has influencers in its sights. Financial adviser Hannah McQueen points out influencers receiving products or money in exchange for promotion may have to pay tax on it, based on a draft discussion document released by Inland Revenue.