Guidance For Advertisers On Social Media Advertising

The Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) has issued a guidance for advertisers to make certain they abide by advertising codes when working with social media. CAP’s guidance emphasises that the same rules apply to advertising using social media marketing, for instance on Facebook and Twitter, as to conventional media.

The key points are:

– Advertisers are accountable for user generated content on webpages under their control. Therefore advertisers must ensure that any user generated content they incorporate in an advert is accurate rather than misleading, harmful or offensive. Importantly, advertisers who invite users to comment on a product or service, must monitor the responses they receive (including any images or videos) to ensure that they are compliant with the CAP Code rules, as these responses can be part of the ad.

– Consumers need to be able to judge whether or not they are seeing an ad. For ex., to make this clear on Twitter advertisers could use #ad, or #spon if a product is being endorsed.

– Advertisers need to make sure that ads are appropriately targeted and must consider where the ad is displayed and who can view it, and in particular whether it could be seen by children.

– Competitions have to be administered in the same manner that they would be offline. Which means that making the terms and conditions available upfront.

The guidance clearly ensures that advertisers must take the same approach online as they simply do offline. Advertisers who have been not aware that they are responsible for user-generated responses should set up appropriate monitoring systems and make certain their terms and conditions permit them to edit user responses.

Click here for CAP’s guidance.