The UK Advertising Standards Authority has banned a Nike twitter celebrity endorsement campaign on the basis that the footballers concerned did not make it clear that the endorsement tweets were advertisements. Nike argued that consumers would not be misled as it was well known that the players were sponsored by the brand. However, the advertising watchdog determined that this was insufficient - in order to be acceptable it was necessary that the sponsored nature of the tweets be "obviously identifiable", "obvious" and "prominent" (such as #ad) to ensure that they would not be missed by a twitter user scrolling through hundreds of messages a day.
As this is the first ban of a celebrity endorsement by the Authority, it is a very revealing elaboration of exactly how strictly the regulations will be applied to endorsement speech - and, at first glance, apparently quite strictly. It is interesting to note that the tweets themselves did not mention Nike. Rather, they were a reference to the player's 'goals for the year' which simply linked to Nike (implying that it was through Nike that they would achieve these goals) and, according to Nike, both players were free to post the tweets "at their own discretion".
Accordingly, it seems to be the case that a sponsored celebrity cannot even link to one of their sponsors without the linking being regarded as an ad. I wonder whether this would be applied in the same way to bloggers - if I accept an advertisement on my blog, am I no longer able to speak about the advertiser in any way without it being regarded as an ad? And without having to characterise the post as an advertisement? Given the number of bloggers blogging about companies with whom they have a financial relationship, I wonder about the chilling implications of the decision for speech in the blogosphere. What do you think? Is this an advertisement? Is it misleading? Is it good for the watchdog to be extra cautious?
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