A message from the Founding Team.
If you’re a content creator, influencer marketer, or legal counsel for a brand you’ve undoubtedly been paying attention to the recent announcements from the FTC and ASA concerning sponsorship compliance and the potential impact it can have on your business.
The FTC and ASA recently established regulations whereby audiences on social media platforms must be made aware of any financial or incentivized relationship between a brand and content creator. This applies to sponsorships, product endorsements and placements, promotions, and where products and/or services have been provided to a content creator free of charge for the purposes of reviewing on their channel.
These rulings are applicable to any content that can be viewed within a regulator’s jurisdiction, so they’re not confined to where a channel is based. Latterly, 700 leading companies were put on notice on 21st October 2021, which means fines for non-compliance can be imposed immediately for up to $43,735 per post per day.
Importantly, these rulings aren’t designed to undermine or limit marketing spend or activities on social media platforms. Far from it. These rulings target bad actors intent on misleading or harming audiences.
As brands target more spend on social media and video social media, regulation was inevitable.
Monitoring social media text posts is relatively simple. The same cannot be said for on-demand and live-streamed video on platforms like YouTube and Twitch, which combined are seeing 2000 hours of new content uploaded every minute of every day.
Video content is presented linearly, so how does a brand ensure compliance statements have been made when they’re working with 100s of content creators? How many staff would it take to watch every piece of video content for its duration, checking for product mentions and appropriate compliance declarations? In short; it can’t be done manually at any kind of meaningful scale.
This is the problem RippleXn is solving. Using Machine Learning and NLP technologies, RippleXn is able to audit video posts as they happen, identifying brand, product and services mentions, and whether the necessary compliance statements have been made.
Crucially, this is about enablement and safeguarding brands, content creators, and their respective audiences. As with any regulation, if enforcement becomes necessary then the process hasn’t worked. Think of a traffic camera. It’s there to stop people speeding, so if a fine is issued the objective hasn’t been met in that instance. The same is true of protecting audiences and customers.
RippleXn has been designed to integrate seamlessly into existing marketing and content creation workflows, identify compliance problems as early as possible, and provide comprehensive audit trails for brands to demonstrate best efforts have been made to ensure campaigns are compliant should a complaint trigger regulator scrutiny.
Our rollout is happening now in the Video Games industry, closely followed by Leisure, Travel, Sports, Consumer Tech, Finance and Luxury. If you would like to find out more or participate.
