Dr Catalina Goanta
Small Group Project 2018-19
DIY (Do-It-Yourself) Marketing: Influencer Endorsements and the Regulation of Social Marketplaces
With Sofia Ranchordás
This research project aims to shed light on the regulatory challenges of a current social media trend that has received little attention from the academic literature: ‘influencer marketing’. Digital influencers are typically social media users who start out as anonymous citizens but who reach stardom with self-made visual content. These ‘prosumers’ attract thousands of digital followers while sharing day-to-day behaviour and their lifestyle advice on fitness, nutrition or parenting. Marketing literature has suggested that their followers internalise this non-expert advice as they perceive social media influencers as authentic.
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Biography
Catalina Goanta is Associate Professor in Law & Technology at Utrecht University Law School’s Molengraaff Institute, and Principal Investigator of the European Research Council Starting Grant HUMANads (2022-2027), focused on understanding the impact of content monetization on social media and on reinterpreting private law fairness in the context of platform governance, with a particular focus on influencer advertising. With a PhD in European consumer protection, between 2016-2021 she was Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law at Maastricht University, and between 2018 and 2019 she was a Niels Stensen fellow at the University of St. Gallen and Harvard University. She is also a member of the dispute resolution body of the Dutch Advertising Council (Reclame Code Commissie). In her research, she bridges methods from legal research as well as computer science and media studies to investigate commercial technology practices and their impact on consumers, as well as the broader regulatory implications.
Biographical details correct as of 11.05.26