¿Tuits sponsored the advertorials?

What if, suddenly one day, several of your most admired and followed tweeters were devoted to his followers to spread the benefits of a particular product? ¿That influence your perception of that product? ¿That would affect your buying decision? Would you change anything if you say they do because that brand has paid for it prescribed?

Everyone is aware that, currently, a marketing strategy appropriate recommendation gives very good results for brands. However, we must ensure that their design and development is consistent with the applicable advertising rules.

Some time ago I wrote about the growing trend detected in the United States consisting of broadcast, social media, communications of a commercial nature that appear in front of users as personal opinions and editorial content. And how the abuse in this activity led to the competent authority to issue a rule that would regulate the so-called "sponsored blogs."

This practice poses many risks covert, legal and ethical, in that it violates the principle of transparency and clear identification of the commercial nature of the internet content that requires regulation. In particular, Article 20.1 of the Law of Services of the Information Society (LSSI) provides, in general, that "commercial communications by electronic means must be clearly identifiable as such and the person or entity on behalf of which are made must also be clearly identifiable. "

And by "advertising", the Act refers to "any form of communication aimed at promoting, directly or indirectly, of the image or the goods or services of a company, organization or person conducting business, industrial , craft or profession, "which is a definition broad enough to frame any marketing action.

As shown in the above standard, the use of prescribing practice is not prohibited as long as it complies with the provisions of transparency that makes the advertising regulations , which is intended to protect consumers in the sense of avoiding that mistake a advertising content with personal opinion of the sender. That is, should be allowed to clearly identify the content that you do get is actually a commercial communication since otherwise we would be incurring a case of surreptitious advertising .

The problem here is that, as one of the exceptions to what should be considered legally as online advertising, the law itself mentions those "communications relating to goods, services or image that is offered when they are developed by a third and without payment. " Thus, there is great difficulty in being able to prove when someone spreads an e-coupon, in principle, by choice or when it does derived from a payment by an employer. In this case we must resort to circumstantial evidence, which are what allow us to conclude whether a communication is or not for commercial purposes, with the difficulty that this entails in practice.

Some countries have already begun to open investigations relating to certain messages in social networks and recommendations on forums, where your commercial real has not been properly disclosed. For example, in the UK the regulator is investigating a dispute referred to a published tweets from the accounts of several celebrities, in which he said "is not you when you are hungry", so to determine whether course is a punishable product advertising disguised Snickers , Mars, since it coincides with the slogan of the campaign. What is interesting about this case is that after several tweets used the hashtag # spon in order to highlight the promotional character of those.

Similarly, in United States is discussing an action , which presumably would be responsible Amazon , which offered economic benefits to all those Kindle buyers Fire their comments positive product online. Some, however, denied the promotional nature of this activity, saying it could qualify as "incentive".

In any case, within the geographical areas in which we are, the European Parliament has also expressed concern regarding the proliferation of such practices. Thus, in its Resolution on the effects of advertising on consumer behavior , December 2010, and denounced the development of a surreptitious advertising on the Internet, where some operators financed, directly or indirectly, activities to promote the dissemination of messages electronically or comments about products and services that seem to emanate from the consumers themselves actually the case for advertising messages or commercial.

This initiative appears headed for a possible better control of such unfair activities by the competent authorities, although Spain has not been reflected yet in practice.