Last weekend, Lord & Taylor paid 50 bloggers to wear a dress from its new Design Lab clothing collection and post it to Instagram, all at the same time. The initiative grabbed headlines the following week because the blitz worked incredibly well: the featured dress sold out within days of the posts.
However, a Marketing Land report reveals that none of the bloggers specified that Lord & Taylor had sponsored the Instagram posts, which puts the campaign in violation of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission guidelines for digital advertising. In the report, Marketing Land spoke with the founder and CEO of Izea, a company that pairs up brands and bloggers for campaigns like this.
Read the Full Article on Racked
IZEA FEATURED
From Ted Murphy, IZEA Founder & CEO
“It’s really difficult being in this space today to claim that you didn’t understand that that’s how things were supposed to be done,” the founder, Ted Murphy, told Marketing Land. Murphy says that in his experience, sponsored posts haven’t garnered less engagement on social media and when bloggers denote which posts are ads, it builds credibility among followers. As it stands, Murphy pointed out that people had commented on the Lord & Taylor-sponsored posts wondering if they were sponsored.
“I actually think in the long run it is the only way to do this and be successful, because once people feel like they’ve been tricked or deceived, they lose trust in the brand and they perceive it negatively,” Murphy says. “And the same happens to the creator. Once people figure out that the person who they thought was just taking a picture in a dress that they liked was actually being paid to do that and was not disclosing that to them, that authenticity and credibility that person had with you is eroded.”
