As the Children’s Advertising Review Unit’s (CARU) recent decision in Case #6456 involving Coco Vida Corp. makes clear, advertisers that use child influencers must make sure kids can tell when they are looking at an ad.
Background
Coco Vida markets athletic apparel and activewear for children, including coordinated athletic sets, leggings, sports bras, and shorts marketed toward young girls. CARU came across Coco Vida’s influencer content through its routine monitoring and opened an inquiry. The inquiry focused on Instagram and other social media posts in which child influencers, including a child influencer named Layla, wore Coco Vida apparel while doing gymnastics, sports, and lifestyle content.
The posts tagged Coco Vida’s accounts, included interactions with Coco Vida’s official account, and were presented in a promotional way. However, CARU did not observe disclosures such as “#ad,” “paid partnership,” “sponsored,” or similar language presented clearly and conspicuously in several of the posts that could be easily understood by children. Coco Vida cooperated with the inquiry and explained that it runs an ambassador program involving child athletes and influencers. The company stated that, going forward, it intends to require ambassadors to use disclosures such as “#CocoVidaAmbassador” or similar language.
Lessons for Advertisers
- Kids’ content is evaluated from a child’s point of view. Once content is child-directed, as it was in this case, CARU’s guidelines require advertisers to account for children’s limited knowledge, experience, and sophistication, as well as their limited ability to understand persuasive intent. Importantly, content need not be labeled “for kids” to be considered child-directed. The people featured, the themes, and the platform can all make it so, and disclosures in child-directed content must be understandable to a child.
- Tags are not disclosures. Tagging Coco Vida’s account and engaging with it did not tell children that the influencers had a material connection to the brand. CARU’s guidelines require advertisers to make sure their endorsers clearly and conspicuously disclose any material connection, and that disclosures take children’s limited vocabularies and language skills into account.
- Organic-looking content can blur the line between ads and entertainment. CARU found that the posts looked like ordinary social media content and used athletic, gymnastics, and lifestyle themes that could make it harder for children to recognize them as commercial. Under the guidelines, advertising must be easily identifiable as advertising, and advertisers must take extra care to be transparent with children. Where sponsored content resembles independent posts, disclosures should be especially prominent and easy for a child to understand.
- Build a compliance program. Beyond disclosures, CARU recommended that Coco Vida take additional steps to make sure its child-directed influencer advertising is readily identifiable as advertising, and that it put monitoring and compliance procedures in place for influencer content involving children. CARU also noted Coco Vida’s statement that it sometimes reposts or collaborates on content from customers who independently buy its products and tag the company. It is important to remember that ambassador agreements should require child-appropriate disclosures, written guidelines should specify acceptable disclosure language and placement, and ongoing monitoring should confirm that influencers follow them.
CARU’s decision underscores that influencer marketing to children requires extra care, and that “clear and conspicuous” means clear and conspicuous to a child. As always, our advertising team is happy to advise on best practices for influencer programs and child-directed advertising.
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