For media practitioners having to track programmatic ad spending from competitors, there could be an even bigger headache looming this cycle: tracking influencers.
Influencer marketing is a bigger line item, or a first-time inclusion in many campaigns’ budgets this cycle. But keeping a handle on who is posting what for whom is going to be a challenge, based on the conclusion of researchers looking at European digital ad data.
According to influencer political marketing practitioners, sponsored influencer posts and ads are saved in the ad libraries of the individual creators on the platform, as well as the entity which sponsored the ad or post, if they’re tagged. But a new report from Mozilla, the free software community, notes that only about a fifth of influencers publishing posts with sponsored content “systematically disclosed this.”
“We note that Meta, LinkedIn, YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok, and Pinterest include branded/influencer content in their repositories, though it is not certain that they enforce its inclusion in practice,” the researchers wrote. “Critically, these repositories are far from compatible, making it difficult for researchers to study paid influence across the platforms systematically. Finally, these transparency tools were often difficult to even locate in the first place. A few are accessible through several clicks from an ad in the interface, but in many cases we had to dig into the platforms’ terms and conditions.”
More broadly, they concluded that “none” of the ad transparency tools at companies including Meta, TikTok, where the Biden campaign is focusing its influencer outreach, and X are working effectively for researchers.
The report, which Mozilla conducted with Finnish software company Check First, analyzed ad transparency including Alphabet’s Google Search & YouTube, LinkedIn, Meta, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok, X, and others.
They tested things like functionality, data accessibility, and accuracy of ad libraries (“repositories”) to determine if they could in fact use these transparency tools to determine who was behind paid ads — both commercial and political. The research focused on Europe because the EU has a law, the Digital Services Act, which requires what it calls “very large online platforms and search engines” to have ad repositories or libraries. The report was timed as a “stress test” for the repositories ahead of upcoming European elections in 2024, which could include a United Kingdom parliamentary election expected to be called late in the year.
Now, it should be noted that the report is based on European advertising and didn’t specifically test what it called “political content,” saying it was beyond their scope. The researchers wrote: “[P]olicies on including political content, and definitions of political content, vary across the VLOs.
“During our testing, we found that Meta, Alphabet, and Snapchat allow political advertising on their platforms in the EU and distinguish these ads in their ad repositories and APIs. Others prohibit it. The European Institutions have recently agreed on regulation on the transparency and targeting of political advertising which may change this situation.”
But other than specifically paid political content, the researchers were concerned with paid content used to spread misinformation or disinformation to voters.
“None of the 12 ad transparency tools created by the world’s largest tech platforms to aid watchdogs in monitoring advertising are operating as effectively as needed, leaving voters worldwide vulnerable to disinformation and manipulation,” according to a release on the report’s findings.
The researchers went on to single out X as the worst offender when it came to its ad database: “X’s transparency tools are an utter disappointment.”
