Influencer’s Instagram posts for Charlotte Tilbury banned by advertising regulator
An influencer’s Instagram posts for make-up brand Charlotte Tilbury have been banned after they failed to include any indication that they were ads.
An Instagram reel and story posted by former Made In Chelsea star Eliza Batten in January showed her applying various Charlotte Tilbury products, with a swipe-up link in the story taking users to the relevant product page on the Charlotte Tilbury website.
A viewer complained that neither of the posts were obviously identifiable as ads.
Charlotte Tilbury Beauty told the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) that Batten received a small commission via a third-party influencer network in exchange for providing swipe-up links to the Charlotte Tilbury website in her Instagram stories.
Separately, the brand’s PR agency had gifted Batten’s agent with a selection of free Charlotte Tilbury products in November 2020, but added that they did not request any posts in exchange for the gifted items and had no approval of the content posted including any specific phrases, hashtags or links.
Batten said the products in the posts were gifted products and that she had subsequently added “#ad” to the Instagram Reel after being contacted about the complaint.
She also apologised for missing the hashtag from any other post related to the gifts from Charlotte Tilbury which may have gone live on her Instagram Stories.
The ASA said there was nothing in the content of either of Batten’s posts that made it clear to viewers that they were ads.
The ASA said: “We therefore concluded that the ads were not obviously identifiable as marketing communications and did not make clear their commercial intent.
“We told Charlotte Tilbury Beauty and Eliza Batten to ensure that in future their ads, including those which featured affiliate links, were obviously identifiable as marketing communications and made clear their commercial intent upfront, for example, by including a clear and prominent identifier such as ‘#ad’ at a minimum.”
