Who: The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA)
Where: United Kingdom
When: 9 May 2025
Law stated as at: 2 June 2025
What happened:
The ASA has published a report looking at the extent to which influencers are adhering to the rules on disclosing when their social media posts are advertisements.
Using its artificial intelligence (AI)-driven Active Ad Monitoring system, the ASA scrutinised over 50,000 social media posts from 509 UK accounts and 390 influencers and manually assessed a representative sample.
The ASA found some improvement in ad disclosure since its last report in 2021 but concluded that the overall rate was still lower than expected and further targeted enforcement action is needed.
The ASA’s key findings:
- Based on the study, the ASA estimated that around 57% of influencer content analysed was properly disclosed as advertisements, while 43% had no disclosure at all.
- Some of the undisclosed ads did attempt to use disclosure labels such as “gifted”, “pr trip” or “affiliate”. However, the ASA has previously ruled and the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has previously advised that such terminology does not sufficiently clarify the commercial nature of the content.
- The ASA said that it will impose sanctions on influencer accounts that consistently and repeatedly fail to disclose, or inadequately disclose, posts as advertising.
The ASA has also reiterated some other related points:
- Everyone is accountable. All the parties in the advertising supply chain must contribute to ensuring that all advertising content is clearly disclosed. Influencers, brands and agencies should use platforms’ own ad disclosure tools.
- Ads must be obviously identifiable as ads. ASA and CMA advice strongly recommends applying “Ad” or “#ad” to social media posts to make it clear. If influencers want to highlight the type of commercial relationship, they should put “Ad” first – for example, “Ad – Gifted”, “#ad – prtrip”.
- Each piece of advertising content must be disclosed as an ad. Influencers and brands cannot rely on ad disclosure in bios or other advertising posts to comply with the rules.
- Own brand content. When advertising a brand, the ASA will find disclosure “clear by context” if the content clearly states that it is own brand advertising. No additional ad disclosure label will be required in that situation. If the brand name matches the name of the advertiser’s account, there is a higher likelihood that ad disclosure will be considered “clear by context”. However, the ASA has previously ruled that disclosure using abbreviated versions of an influencer’s name is unlikely to be regarded as clear. If the names do not match, it is best to include an ad disclosure label.
Why this matters: Influencer ad disclosure is a hot topic in both the UK and internationally. The lack of transparency around advertising and selling through social media, including influencer marketing, was one of the problematic online practices identified by the European Commission in its “fitness check” of EU consumer law published last year. The upcoming Digital Fairness Act, expected in 2026/27, is set to tackle these issues. The ASA attributes the improvement in ad disclosure found in the study to its compliance monitoring activities and the enforcement action it has been taking. However, the regulator is also clear that further action is required. The publication of the ASA’s report on the online supply pathway of ads for age-restricted products in December last year and its recent study of in-app ads that harmfully objectify women, coupled with its plans to create a set of principles that intermediaries sign up to, suggests that the ASA is focusing more and more on intermediary parties in the supply pathway, such as influencers, and encouraging them to ensure compliance with the rules alongside advertisers and publishers.
