80% of sponsored posts on Instagram last month weren’t disclosed as ads

With winter holiday shopping well underway, creators are uploading thousands of sponsored videos and posts across digital platforms like YouTube and Instagram every day—and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is very serious about those posts being correctly disclosed as branded content. Over the last few years, the commission has rolled out more and more specific guidelines for sponcon, letting creators know exactly when they need to tell their audience that they were paid to promote brands, products, and services.

But despite these clear guidelines, as many as 80% of sponsored posts put up on Instagram in November were not labeled as ads, according to a study by new marketing analytics platform Ravineo.

Ravineo, which was co-founded by Socialbakers founder/CEO Jan Řežáb, officially launched last month. Řežáb told Adweek the company uses artificial intelligence to analyze data from social platforms, with a goal of understanding the scope of creator-led brand exposure on these sites.

Basically, its AI looks at every post that mentions a specific brand and uses a set of established criteria to judge whether those posts are sponsored. It also rates each post’s content’s prominence on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being “super-prominent.”

For this study, Ravineo only looked at sponsored Instagram text, photo, and video posts its AI rated 9 or 10 on the prominence scale. Then it took those posts and employed manual human verification to reach out to brands and determine whether they were actually sponsored, or if a creator was just organically talking about a brand because they liked it. Řežáb said over 90% of the posts Ravineo’s AI flagged were manually confirmed as sponsored.

Ultimately, the AI found 13,432 sponsored posts that went up in the month of November.

And, like we mentioned above, a whopping 80% of those sponsored posts were not properly disclosed per FTC guidelines, Ravineo says.

“We know by the brands directly that these are paid partnerships—and we know they are not declared,” Řežáb told Adweek. Ravineo says it has direct partnerships with over 100 brands, some of which have been using its analytics system since the system went into beta this past February.

He went on to sympathize with brands, saying that if a creator fails to disclose a sponsorship, it can be more challenging for companies to tell how successful the campaign content was, and to know if the creator and their audience are a good fit for continued partnership.

However, there’s another party impacted here: creators’ audiences. The FTC’s intent with sponsored content guidelines is to ensure that a creator’s audience understands when the creator is being paid to sell them something. Brand deals are obviously a major source of revenue for content creators, and there’s nothing wrong with taking them. But it gets dicey when a creator has a financially beneficial relationship with a company, and fails to let their audience know that any interest and sales generated from viewers could line their pockets.

Why would creators choose not to properly label their sponsored content? Some have expressed worry that platforms are purposefully suppressing any sponsored content that doesn’t directly benefit the platform itself. Others may worry about their viewers seeing them as a sellout.

Creator audiences, though, can be pretty receptive to brand placement. Just look at the success folks are having with TikTok Shop, where they advertise items from the ecommerce hub in their videos. Creator-led marketing has been growing year over year, with companies consistently choosing to place creators at the forefront of their campaigns because they see positive results driven by those creators’ viewers.

We should also note here that we haven’t independently confirmed Ravineo’s findings. But, if the problem with mislabeled sponsored content is even a fraction as widespread as Ravineo’s study suggests, there could be hundreds or thousands more undisclosed ads going live in December–and we could see another FTC crackdown on creators in the coming months.