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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday August 20 2015, @04:01AM   Printer-friendly
from the can't-even-trust-youtube-anymore dept.

Video bloggers (or vloggers) on sites such as YouTube must be up-front about videos that are paid advertisements, according to UK's Cap:

The UK's Committee of Advertising Practice (Cap) has published new guidelines for video bloggers who enter marketing relationships with brands. The rules encourage vloggers to label advertising content and explain when they have been asked to feature products sent to them by companies. Videos could carry digital text such as "sponsored" or "ads". Last year, the advertising authority ruled that several vlogs praising Oreo biscuits were not clearly marked.

[...] In a statement, Shahriar Coupal, director of Cap, said: "Wherever ads appear we should be confident we can trust what an advertiser says; it's simply not fair if we're being advertised to and are not made aware of that fact." However, the guidelines noted that when free items are sent to vloggers without any editorial or content control over videos exerted by the brand in question, there is no need for them to follow the Cap code.

The Oreo videos in question were "banned" by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), but not removed from YouTube. The statement "Thanks to Oreo for making this video possible" was not considered sufficient acknowledgment that the videos were advertisements.

The ASA is a non-statutory organization that helps the advertising industry self-regulate, and thus has less influence over advertising on the World Wide Web, yet vloggers seem ready to comply:

Guy Parker, the chief executive of the U.K.'s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), said at an event in London March that since the Mondelez ruling, vloggers had been actively asking the advertising watchdog for help on the issue.

The guidance issued by the CAP gives a list of eight scenarios of the types of commercial relationships that take place between brands and vloggers, and when the UK advertising rules kick in:

  • Online marketing by a brand: Where a brand collaborates with a vlogger and makes a vlog about the brand and/or its products and shares it on its own social media channels.
  • "Advertorial" vlogs: A whole video is in the usual style of the vlogger but the content is controlled by the brand and the vlogger has been paid.
  • Commercial breaks within vlogs: Where most of the vlog is editorial material but there's also a specific section dedicated to the promotion of a product.
  • Product placement: Independent editorial content that also features a commercial message.
  • Vlogger's video about their own product: The sole content of a vlog is a promotion of the vlogger's own merchandise.
  • Editorial video referring to a vlogger's products: A vlogger promotes their own product within a broader editorial piece.
  • Sponsorship: A brand sponsors a vlogger to create a video but has no control of the content
  • Free items: A brand sends a vlogger items for free without any control of the content of the vlog.

Related: Campaigners Urge FTC to Investigate YouTube for Kids App


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  • (Score: 1) by AlphaSnail on Thursday August 20 2015, @02:09PM

    by AlphaSnail (5814) on Thursday August 20 2015, @02:09PM (#225387)

    How about the cutoff is if you start to mention and or talk about the product at all it crosses the line. Show me the pepsi, fine. Drink the pepsi, fine. Climb into your 18 wheeler with the pepsi logo on the side, fine. While chatting in conversation mention the name Pepsi out loud like at all, then you gotta admit if you were paid or you get in trouble. I feel like showing the logo and saying the product in conjunction is possibly enough of a definition. You don't HAVE to show a pepsi can and many film and TV productions have inserted fake products just to avoid this issue. Other than that the grey areas might be blurry and people stepping toward that line might not realize they've crossed it.