TikTok and Meta regularly deny any algorithmic punishment of sponsored content, but the numbers don’t lie. All evidence suggests that both platforms limit organic reach of content marked as sponsored and prioritize viewership of promotional content that is paid.
Some in the industry have responded to this by loosening their disclosure requirements and passing the risk of FTC fines to the creators. (Casey and I talked about this on The Art of Sway podcast a few weeks ago if you’d like to hear more about this insanity.) The problem with this tactic is that even if you can mitigate the financial risk of an FTC fine, you are still open to lawsuits. Robert Freund is an advertising and e-commerce attorney who shares a lot of great content about all of the legal issues surrounding our industry, and he has a wonderful Instagram post highlighting some of the higher profile current lawsuits against brands who have ignored the need to disclose.
If these crazy high lawsuit numbers don’t scare you, I’d encourage you to step back and think about the ethics for a moment. Skipping disclosure seriously undermines the rights of your end consumers. Social media users deserve to know if an influencer was paid to share their thoughts on a brand, and the reality is that this disclosure won’t impact your bottom line. There are several research studies that demonstrate no harm to effectiveness of content that is disclosed as sponsored including this study by Lui QuanQuan, Yu Sae-Kyung, and Yang YaTing that found that sponsorship disclosure doesn’t reduce the marketing effectiveness of short-form videos, and, in fact, it actually generates goodwill towards the creators who include it.
So.. if skipping disclosure is risky and wrong, but algorithms throttle sponsored content, what are we to do? It’s pretty simple. It should be standard practice for all sponsored content campaigns to include significant budget for paid amplification. This will mitigate the impact of the algorithms, allow you to more accurately hit your target demographic, AND give you the ability to more accurately predict the performance of your campaigns. It’s not that complicated!
More next week,
Danielle