Dive Brief:
- At least one of BuzzFeed’s sponsored content listicles ran afoul of the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority by overly blurring the line between editorial content and paid advertising.
- The native ad, "14 Laundry Fails We’ve All Experienced," ran in October, advertising laundry and home-care specialists Dylon, and generated a user complaint to the ASA.
- Although the content was labeled as sponsored content on the homepage and in search results, the regulatory agency determined the content page itself was misleading and required readers to view the entire native ad before seeing the reference to Dylon at the bottom of the page.
Dive Insight:
The ASA contested that BuzzFeed had insufficiently labeled the native ad as sponsored.
"While we acknowledged that these elements implied a connection with Dylon, we considered they were not sufficient to make clear that the main content of the web page was an advertorial and that editorial content was therefore retained by the advertiser. We further noted that the web page was very long and visitors to it would therefore not see the reference to Dylon Colour Catcher at the bottom of the page until they had already engaged with the content," the ASA ruling said.
For its part BuzzFeed responded to the reprimand by stating there was a lack of ASA rulings on how native ads needed to be labeled in the UK and the publisher was working from U.S. standards on labeling sponsored content.
In the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently released new guidelines for native ads, specifically around how sponsored content should be labeled. The FTC hinted that enforcement of the guidelines might be coming sooner than later if publishers don’t get into compliance.