Influencer marketing for age-restricted products involves collaborating with social media personalities & creators to promote products that have legal age restrictions for sale/purchase or usage. These typically include alcohol, tobacco, vaping products, knives/weapons, and gambling services. The normal goal is to leverage the influencer's reach and credibility to engage the appropriate audience while adhering to legal requirements.
Compliance ensures that marketing efforts do not target underage individuals, protecting both the brand and the influencer from legal repercussions. Non-compliance can lead to fines, legal action, and damage to brand reputation. For example, alcohol advertising is often restricted from being shown to audiences under the legal drinking age. Similarly, tobacco and vaping products usually have strict guidelines to avoid targeting minors, and gambling ads must not appeal to those under the legal gambling age.
The above talks about targeting your end-audience correctly. However, a commonly overlooked area is about the Creator themselves!
Non-compliance can result in significant legal consequences. These include fines and penalties from regulatory bodies, legal action from affected parties, and loss of consumer trust and brand credibility.
Regulators have often called out and fined brands and/or their agencies for their targeting. Sometimes not utilizing native advertising platforms targeting criteria correctly. But again, there is currently no formal solution for creator verification!
Training influencers is crucial for maintaining compliance. Key steps include providing clear guidelines on legal requirements, offering examples of compliant and non-compliant content, and conducting regular training sessions and updates to ensure that influencers are well-informed and up-to-date with any changes in regulations.
Identifying suitable influencers involves ensuring their audience demographics align with the legal age requirements. It is equally important to review their previous content for compliance and check their engagement metrics to ensure they have an authentic and mature following.
Know Your Customer (KYC) processes for influencers should include verifying the influencer's age and identity. Simple as that!
An ongoing challenge is knowing who a channel/handle is owned and operated by. Using platforms that involved OAuth’ing in, at minimum shows that they have the admin rights to operate the channel.
The next level is to use industry standard processes developed for banking to validate identity, age, address etc. Done by a third party makes it easy and cost effective for brands and agencies to do the right thing.
Best practices include:
You have two choices:
But how?
RippleXn's creator sign-up feature will streamline the KYC process.
So, if you invoke this option when using CreatorCRM and Digital Product Distribution you can make better decisions.