I’ve written about FTC rulings on paid social posts in the past, and most recently here, but we are at it again with one of the biggest fiasco’s of the year so far in the form of the Fyre Festival. Celebrities went wild with posts in prep for the music festival set in Bahamas by promoting it and getting paid in excess of $100,000. Though, when the event started to go south and become a complete PR nightmare many celebrities deleted their posts and removed themselves from the issue, but kept the money paid to promote it. Not good. 

As you can imagine this type of situation can grab the attention of many people and especially the FTC as they continue to crack down on influencers marketing. The event was planned to be a top tier party for some of the biggest pockets in the world. When the day came to fly out to the Bahamas to see the grand show in action the venues and stages were half built, “luxury suites” were nothing but tents on the beach, and food was scrapped down to what some described as simply bread and cheese sandwiches. Not hard to see why many celebrities that promoted the event, and didn’t even go, went ahead and deleted those promoted posts. 

The legal issues actually began before the event as many celebrities were never saying it was a paid ad in their social feeds. Though after the events when everyone found out it was a complete and utter failure influencers began taking down paid posts to keep their names clean of the mess. That created quite the stir from various agencies and organizers since they already paid big money to have those posts on their page. Lawsuits have been issued to a few names as it was within their contracts to keep those posts up for x amount of days after the event. 

Sure, it sucks to add #sponsored or #ad to your posts caption, it instantly makes it less engaging and genuine, but it’s part of the rules. That is the game today when it comes to sponsored content on social media across the board. So if you plan on getting paid to promote a product and look to share about it on social, be sure to check on the latest rulings by the FTC. In my own experience I have found it to be easy to state I am working with the brand or telling folks I have gotten the product for free to test or review. In many cases to make it explicit I will add “In collaboration with” at the base of the post to keep my caption clean.

What do you think? Does this sound like a normal progression for advertising? Or is it crazy we have gotten to the point of needing to label what is an ad and that you are being sold? Let me know in the comments below or hit me up on Instagram to chat!

And if you need a reminder on how NOT to promote a product on your social media accounts be sure to check out this old post by Kardashian famed personality Scott Disick here.