New Guidelines Announced for Social Media Influencers for Disclosure of Promotional Ad Content
The Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) has issued draft guidelines for social media influencers in order to bring transparency to digital media. ASCI pointed out that today influencer advertising has become quite popular, and the majority of posts that influencers publish are promotional, yet most of them aren’t recognized as such. This type of non-disclosure is a disservice to people and is also more or less misleading. According to the new guidelines, all social media influencers will need to reveal whether a particular creative post (image, video, or written content) is an advertisement or not. Moreover, if there are any product placements, influencers will have to add a pre-approved disclosure label that mentions the same precisely. In addition to this, they won’t be allowed to tweak the disclosure labels and will have to stick to the permitted labels only. These new social media rules apply to all social networking platforms such as Facebook, Instagram...