While lawmakers and national security regulators scrutinize mobile video app TikTok over its Chinese ownership, marketing experts and advocacy groups say the increasingly popular influencer marketing tool runs the risk of drawing the attention of yet another regulator: the Federal Trade Commission.
On TikTok, a platform popular with teenagers, marketing and advocacy experts say that the platform’s newness and focus on organic content put disclosures in a potential legal gray area that could warrant regulatory attention.
The Federal Trade Commission’s guidelines, which were updated last month, requires that social media influencers disclose up front when they have any financial, employment, personal or family relationship with a brand they’re promoting on their feeds, such as by adding “#ad” or “#sponsored” in the first few lines of a caption. For videos, including those found on TikTok, the agency said they should be disclosing the sponsorship not only in the caption, but also in the multimedia content itself.
But for TikTok, compliance with FTC rules may not be that easy: Much like with defunct Twitter Inc.-owned app Vine, TikTok videos are short-form, with a cap at one minute, and are often set to a piece of music, so incorporating a verbal disclosure is difficult.
Bonnie Patten, executive director of Truth in Advertising, which has previously lobbied the FTC to examine influencer ad disclosures on Instagram, said the advocacy group has started looking into potential disclosure problems on TikTok, but her team is finding it difficult to distinguish between organic content and sponsored influencer advertisements on the platform.
She noted that captions for the platform’s videos tend to be less visible than those on more established marketing sites like Instagram — setting up a potentially messy regulatory scheme for the app that’s now outpacing Instagram in global monthly app downloads, according to Sensor Tower Store Intelligence.
“While TikTok might be a new platform, it suffers from the same old problems that we see on other social media platforms,” Patten said, namely the presence of influencers “who are marketing products without appropriately disclosing that they have a material connection with the company that they’re endorsing.”
Truth in Advertising has already begun preparing to investigate influencer ad disclosures on TikTok, with spokesperson Shana Mueller saying the group has a few potential influencer “targets” in mind to examine next year, especially with the FTC scheduled to review and possibly make changes to its influencer marketing guidelines in 2020.
Patten said in her casual perusal of the app she hasn’t seen any TikTok influencers following the FTC’s suggestion to include sponsored disclosures in both the captions and the content.
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December 13, 2019 at 04:42AM
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Consumer Groups Say TikTok Risks Drawing Scrutiny of Yet Another Regulator, the FTC - Morning Consult
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