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. Recently, influencers have also started earning their livelihood through endorsement contracts and brand advertisement that are not often explicitly disclosed on social media. Given their large audiences, influencers are very effective not only at creating online engagement for the companies that contract their services, but also at manipulating their followers’ opinions and transactional behaviour who do not always distinguish between genuine and sponsored marketing advice. Although advertisement regulations include endorsements made on Instagram or Youtube by ‘prosumers, influencers appear to disregard these regulatory limits. This is highly problematic as average social media users are at an ever greater risk of falling prey to inconspicuous advertising practices.

Drawing on insights from different strands of the legal, media studies, and marketing literature (e.g. regulation of digital platforms, consumer law, freedom of speech, branding), this project inquires into the limitations of the current regulatory framework applicable to influencer marketing, and explores how this framework can be adapted to take into account both consumer and commercial interests. This project combines doctrinal legal research with empirical methods (semi-structured interviews with influencers, advertisement agencies and public bodies). Understanding and regulating the digital transformation requires knowledge from multiple disciplines and cultural contexts. This project addresses influencer marketing from an interdisciplinary perspective and draws on different research methods.