Excerpt from TTG
Hotel group Accor has been rapped by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) after the watchdog banned an influencer’s TikTok post about her stay at the famous Savoy hotel in London for not being identifiable as an ad.
Despite a prior commercial agreement between The Savoy and influencer Lydia Elise Millen concerning just Instagram posts in return for hotel stays, the ASA ruled that a TikTok post published around the same time, with similar content that related to the same hotel stay, came under the "ad" umbrella.
The post received complaints for not being obviously identifiable as a marketing communication.
Millen posted on TikTok in November 2022 about a stay for an "annual Christmas shopping trip", inviting her followers to comment on their favourite of two outfits she tried on for a theatre night.
The influencer had a commercial relationship with The Savoy under a "Fairmont Ambassadorship" that included an agreement to post two Instagram stories per stay across two of her five stays at the hotel.
The stay featured in the TikTok post was part of the agreement, but Accor argued that only Instagram posts mentioning Accor brand Fairmont or associated hotels were covered by the terms.
Because the content appeared on TikTok, it was outside the agreement, and so was not paid for and could not be seen as an ad.
Millen's representative pointed to her Instagram posts of the stay being labelled as ads. But the TikTok post did not show The Savoy and the content was not signed off by Fairmont as it was out of scope of the commercial agreement.
The ASA disagreed, saying the TikTok post being of similar content to the Instagram ad, and posted around the same time, was further exposure likely to benefit The Savoy.
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