Tag: Influencers

Thinking About Engaging an Influencer for Your Next Promotion? Plan Ahead!

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Those running promotions such as sweepstakes or contests on social media may seek to engage influencers, or individuals with significant social media followings, to enhance their promotions’ visibility and boost engagement. But before doing so, there are a variety of rules and regulations to consider and evaluate, including Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) rules relating to misleading, deceptive, and unfair advertising, state-specific rules relating to promotions, and social-media-platform-specific rules, among others. This post gives a high-level overview of issues to consider before engaging influencers to boost your next contest or promotion.

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Launching a Sweepstakes or Contest on Social Media – What You Should Know

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As discussed on our blog previously, here and here, a promotion sponsor must finalize Official Rules before a promotion begins. But using a third-party social media platform to administer your promotion or accept entries raises additional issues that must be considered, particularly when the promotion involves the submission of user-generated content (“UGC”).

Using a social media platform to administer your promotion raises two additional issues: (1) ensuring compliance with the platform’s specific promotion requirements; and (2) ensuring that the sponsor is protected from liability if the promotion involves UGC. This blog provides a high-level overview of issues to consider before administering your promotion on a third-party social media platform, and in particular when your promotion involves submission of UGC.

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Ho, Ho, Ho … Hold On … Did Legal Approve That?

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The holidays are upon us — and so too are holiday advertising campaigns. With an unusual holiday season last year, many retailers are gearing up for what they hope to be a robust holiday season. Even with concerns over supply chain issues, retailers and brands are doubling down on holiday advertising campaigns this year and pushing out festive, eye-catching content to lure customers. To stop the Legal Grinch from stealing the gifts from these campaigns, here’s a quick refresher on a few important legal considerations:

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A Social Contract – Terms to Consider for Influencer Advertising Agreements

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Whether you’re paying big bucks for a Kardashian or providing discount coupons to a local star, hiring “influencers” to promote your company, products or services has become commonplace. But it’s not yet common to contract with influencers for their services. And that’s a mistake! If you’re hiring an influencer, you should strongly consider a written agreement.

But first, what is an influencer?

An “Influencer” is: An individual who has the power to affect purchase decisions of others because of his/her authority, knowledge, position or relationship with his/her audience. For legal purposes, an influencer is anybody your company is compensating to post, print, or otherwise disseminate information for a commercial purpose.

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Will New FTC Endorsement Guidelines Make A #Hashtag of Influencer Advertising?

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In a world where social media influencers can wield more power over consumers than network media buys, the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) Endorsement Guides felt increasingly like a relic from an earlier era. While not wholly ineffective, the FTC’s formal guidance to businesses on the use of endorsements and testimonials in advertising was still a policy with roots in the limited media environment of the 1970s, the decade when the Guides originated. There were no Instagram influencers, no sponsored posts, and no hashtags in 1980, when the Guides were finally enacted, and even cable television was in its infancy. And despite important and well-intentioned 2009 amendments crafted during the early days of social media, so much has happened in the intervening years that the Guides never seemed fully engaged with the radical implications of a marketing environment where blurring the lines between advertising and reality is more often a feature rather than a bug.

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FTC Releases New User-Friendly Disclosure Guidelines for Influencers

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The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is not hitting “like” on your influencer engagement campaign, and is down-voting your disclosures.

Earlier this month, the FTC released important new guidance targeted at social media influencers, in language designed to be read by non-lawyers, framing an often confusing legal issue for the people who need to understand it the most: the influencers themselves. These new guidelines, “Disclosures 101 for Social Media Influencers,” were accompanied by a video “Do you endorse things on social media?”, and are designed to show influencers how and when they must disclose material connections to brands to their followers.

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Tech Brings Authentication Challenges In Ad And IP Cases

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The ability of any individual, without access to sophisticated technology, to decipher the “authenticity” of any experience is diminishing daily. Moreover, this threat to the integrity of the law goes beyond digital impersonation and “deep fake” software driven by artificial intelligence. The famous Marx Brothers line, “Who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” was once funny because it was ridiculous. Soon, it will be a description of our jobs and our lives.

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