Hubei Province's first case of influencers being fined 10000 yuan for exploring stores, with promotional short videos not indicating advertising behavior | videos | advertisements
In recent years, various kinds of Internet sharing behaviors, such as visiting stores and planting grass, have led to significant online drainage effects, leading to a number of "online celebrity" stores. However, these behaviors may be suspected of misleading consumers and even illegal. Recently, the Market Supervision Comprehensive Law Enforcement Detachment of Huangshi City, Hubei Province, ordered a consulting company in Hubei Province to correct the behavior of not indicating "advertising" in the promotional short videos of influencers exploring stores, and imposed an administrative penalty of 10000 yuan. It is reported that this is the first case in China where influencers have been punished for violating laws and regulations while visiting stores.
The staff of Huangshi Comprehensive Market Supervision and Law Enforcement Detachment disclosed that a consulting company in Hubei was an authorized service provider of a social platform. After signing an Internet advertising promotion agreement with the relevant merchants, it found a talent to shoot relevant short videos of exploring stores for the merchants, and released them after adding a shopping link to the talent platform number, but the relevant short promotional videos were not marked with "advertising". After consumers generate consumption through shopping links attached to short videos, the company extracts a certain percentage of commission from merchants as promotional expenses.
The third paragraph of Article 9 of the Measures for the Administration of Internet Advertising, which came into effect on May 1 this year, stipulates that if goods or services are promoted through knowledge introduction, experience sharing, consumption evaluation and other forms, and purchase methods such as shopping links are attached, advertising publishers shall clearly mark "advertising".
The corresponding announcement of the Huangshi Comprehensive Market Supervision and Law Enforcement Detachment shows that a consulting company in Hubei has successively released several promotional short videos and attached shopping links after the implementation of the new regulations, and has not marked "advertising", which constitutes the act of publishing non identifiable advertising. According to the provisions of Article 59 of the Advertising Law of the People's Republic of China and Article 25 of the Measures for the Administration of Internet Advertising, law enforcement officials have imposed administrative penalties on the company according to law.
In this regard, a lawyer pointed out that for the short videos of talent shop hunting, talent grass planting, and talent experience that are currently spread across major social and media platforms, as long as links are attached at the same time to achieve jump purchase, they belong to Internet advertising and must be marked with "advertising".
Du Dong, Vice Chairman of the Legal and Ethical Work Committee of the China Advertising Association, stated that the content of influencers exploring stores and planting grass that constitutes commercial advertising does not significantly indicate "advertising", which will damage the social credit system. Because it is difficult for consumers to distinguish whether a video is commercial advertising content or blogger information content, discovering that it does not match the facts after consumption not only leads to distrust of the blogger and platform, but also raises doubts about the social integrity system among the audience over time. In addition, advertisers tend to choose non advertising label based advertising models, which can also have an impact on normal advertising models and labeled advertising models. There will be more advertisers inclined to invest in content that is not labeled, and bloggers hope to gain more short-term profits by not labeling "advertising".
Huangshi Municipal Market Supervision Bureau has clearly proposed that, next, it will carry out special rectification actions for Internet advertising, establish and improve the monitoring system for shop search advertising, improve monitoring measures, timely discover and investigate illegal advertising acts according to law, at the same time, it will open channels for complaints and reports, introduce social supervision forces, and jointly regulate shop search behaviors.