In a new review by the EU Commission, it was clear that four out of five influencers advertise their commercial content incorrectly. The same survey showed that the labels built into the platforms are only used by 38 percent of all influencers.
The violations violate the EU’s directive against unfair business practices, and in the future the EU Commission will tighten the review.
– Today, the vast majority of influencers receive income from their posts, but our review shows that this is not always clear to followers, said Didier Reyndersthe EU’s Justice Commissioner in a press release in connection with the announcement of the results.
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What should and should not be branded can surely feel even more difficult in today’s social media landscape, when many of our biggest influencers have their own brands that they themselves are the face of.
Using products you have developed yourself, staying in your own brand’s office or filming meetings ahead of the upcoming launch – is it advertising or completely normal vlog material?
Bianca Ingrossoco-founder of the beauty empire Caia Cosmetics, talked about those very difficulties in a vlog from December 2022:
– I’ve seen that there are so many who are just “God you have advertising with every video”. Since I vlog, you get to follow what I legitimately do every day. And I work every day with Caia.
– If an artist only talks about how they build their tour, they don’t have to say “in advertising for”. If they tell the idea behind their tour, they don’t have to say “in advertising for”. If they tell the idea behind a song, they don’t have to say “in advertising for”. But I have to say that what I build and create is “advertising for”.
AI gets to review Bianca’s vlogs where Caia Cosmetics is mentioned
The fact that an influencer mentions his company without advertising the commercial content is not in itself against the law.
But how common is it for the brand to be mentioned in content that is not branded, versus content that actually gets a promotional stamp? News24 took the help of AI to investigate the matter more closely, with Bianca Ingrosso and Caia Cosmetics as examples.
Here’s how we did the review
To conduct the survey, we converted Bianca’s 30 most recent YouTube videos to audio files and had the AI tool Whisper Jax transcribe the files.
We then counted the number of times the word “Caia” was mentioned in each video and also noted which videos were advertised and which were not.
This is what we came up with
The review shows that Bianca mentions Caia in 27 out of 30 videos – despite only 18 of them being promotional.
However, there is a clear difference in the number of times she mentions her beauty company depending on whether the video is promotional or not. In an advertising-branded video, Bianca mentions Caia an average of 5.6 times and in an unbranded video, she mentions it less often, more precisely 3.5 times, our mapping shows.
We landed on the fact that there is no remarkable relationship between the advertised and non-advertised clips in this case.
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