An Advertising Standards Authority ruling over a tweet promoting products made by dairy-free brand Alpro has highlighted rules requiring brands to clearly identify paid for social media communications.
The ASA has upheld a complaint that a tweet posted by the TV presenter AJ Odudu – which featured Odudu posing with Alpro Go On products alongside the caption ‘Fave summer snack vibes’ – should have been identified as an advert with an ‘identifier’ such as #ad.
Alpo said it originally considered that the tweet was outside the scope of the CAP code, and didn’t need to use an identifier.
But having established that AJ Odudu had a commercial agreement with Alpro, under which she received payment for publishing a specified number of social media communications (and was prohibited from promoting competitor products), the ASA ruled that the tweet constituted ‘paid for marketing’.
The ASA said: “We concluded that various aspects of the contractual agreement between Alpro and Ms Odudu established that Alpro had sufficient control over the content of the tweet, in conjunction with a payment arrangement, for it to be considered a marketing communication falling within the remit of the CAP Code.
“We therefore next considered whether the ad was obviously identifiable as a marketing communication. The ad was presented in a similar ‘voice’ to Ms Odudu’s other tweets and did not include any clear identifier, such as “#ad”, to demarcate it from her own content. While we noted that the tweet contained the advertiser Twitter handle and campaign hashtags, we did not consider that this would make clear to consumers the commercial intent of the content or the editorial control exercised by the advertiser. We therefore considered that it would not have been obviously identifiable as a marketing communication to Ms Odudu’s Twitter followers and other visitors to her Twitter feed. We.concluded, therefore, that it breached the Code.”
Alpro told the ASA it would ensure that any similar ads would in future be clearly identified as such.
