The Competition Authority has announced that it has initiated a new investigation against Bat Italia and the influencers Cecilia Rodriguez, Stefano De Martino and Stefano Sala: “The Authority disputes the dissemination on the Instagram profile of these influencers, linked by a commercial relationship with Bat Italia, of posts containing an invitation to followers to publish content with tags and hashtags linked to the advertising campaign for the Glo Hyper product, a device for heated tobacco produced and marketed by the company “.
This is yet another episode of an issue on which the Antitrust has long initiated investigative and moral suasion interventions relating to various forms of covert advertising on social media, which provides food for thought on the phenomenon of so-called influencer marketing.
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A topic that affects everyone
The problem of transparency in influencer marketing has many facets that are of absolute interest to professionals and advertising investors and more generally to the information ecosystem in its broadest sense: the transparency in communications it is one of the challenges faced by operators in the sector, whether they are companies, intermediaries or creators. And at stake is the credibility of this young marketing lever that is continuing to grow in our country and in the world.
Second the Buzzoole report on transparency in influencer marketing in Italy, the posts (with the exclusion of Stories) in Italian published on Facebook and Instagram and containing the most used transparency hashtags (such as #Ad, #Adv, #sponsorizzato, #sponsored, # adpagamento, #prodottofornitoda, #advertising and #advertising) in 2020 were 186,700 and generated 268 million interactions. Furthermore, the number of transparent posts published has slightly decreased compared to last year (-5%), an effect that can be attributed to the pandemic, which has prompted some specific sectors to decrease investments in communication.
Unfortunately the difficulty in tracking the volume of opaque activities which, for example, find a place in ephemeral content such as Stories or YouTube videos.
The risk of fraud and deception
A second aspect concerns fraud: according to a recent report from HypeAuditor, an international influencer marketing campaign tracking platform, more than half of Instagram influencers were involved in some form of social media fraud and forgery in 2020.
I mega-influencer and Instagram celebrities, those with more than a million followers, such as Stefano De Martino and Cecilia Rodriguez, were the biggest culprits, with two-thirds (66%) of these accounts involved in some form of fraudulent activity; the so-called nano-influencer (1000 to 5,000 followers) had the lowest rate of fraud, occurring in 42% of accounts.
The most common tactics used included buying followers, likes and comments from “click farm”, buying Stories views and engagement with comment pods, where one group of Instagram users gathers and systematically interacts with each other’s posts.
Second data updated to March 2021In Italy, a fifth of people say they bought a product / service after it was promoted by an influencer.
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The role of the influencer
The last element concerns the figure of the influencer. Which in reality does not exist and is not a profession, as well as it is not that of bloggers. The word influencer simply indicates a figure who, in his field, as he is considered authoritative and credible for what he says and for what he may be able to predict correctly, is able to guide companies, the market, people .
Those who try to be a professional influencer e every day he talks about different brands without the slightest link it cannot be credible: just look at their social pages to realize how they move from one company to another. But companies unfortunately continue to measure the effectiveness of influencers still on follower volumes and reach, rather than on value.
In short, with all the mitigating circumstances applicable to a relatively recent marketing area, the influencers look like Testimonials 2.0 of contemporaneity, but without the coherence and exclusivity of image that the traditional testimonials of the past, such as the famous Calindri, had.
The unsustainable lightness of influencer marketing can only harm brands, companies, institutions and organizations and the credibility of this method of communication. Not surprisingly, recently, Seth Godin has already sentenced that “the future of influencers already belongs to the past. Because in most cases, those who are called influencers are not at all. Rather they are self-reported hackers related to public relations “.
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