Regulation on influencer communication : Is influencer marketing in the Czech republic ethical enough?
Abstract
According to a cross-demographic worldwide research, social media capture around 30% of our online time and the younger groups including children are on the lead. (Young, 2017) As for the case of the Czech Republic, only one out of ten children is able to recognize a hidden advertising on social media, as Hejlová (2018) mentioned in her research. Moreover, the study showed that not labelling the commercial posts is a major problem in the Czech environment, as in 2018, only a minority of influencers used the hashtags #ad or #sponsored.
Considering most of the commercial posts not being tagged but being often consumed by children at the same time, some parts of the Czech influencer marketing might be illegal as the Law forbids advertising to children. Based on my follow-up research, this paper discusses the issue of influencers' ethical decisions in communication and its inadequate regulation in the Czech Republic.
The present Czech Law only partially affects the social media. The influencers cannot aim the advertisement at children or cannot promote alcohol, medicines and tobacco products.
However, there are major mainstream influencers in Czechia who do promote such products, for instance cigarette alternatives - out of top nine influencers promoting IQOS cigarette alternative, three are from the Czech Republic (Keyhole, 2019). Apart from legislative regulations, Czech influencers must follow the rules of their social media platform and cannot use false or misleading business practices such as not tagging the advertisement.
But up to this day, only one Czech influencer was officially fined for not respecting such regulations. As for ethical regulation, some rather fragmented guidelines for influencers exist in some Czech professional associations, nevertheless, my study shows that marketers and influencers themselves admit that the regulation is not efficient enough, thus is a major challenge, as demonstrated below.
My research has already gone through three phases. The first one, conducted in October and November 2019, included over 120 Czech marketing communication professionals who answered the questions on ethical regulations of influencer marketing.
Out of these, 60% use influencers in their communication mix. But only half of them insist on influencers labelling sponsored posts.
Also, 79% think that compliance with the law from both influencers and marketers should be more enforceable and 75% would embrace an ethical code, if one official for influencer communication in Czechia existed. This was also a major topic of the second part of the research - an analysis of discussion with over 45 experts representing scientists, marketers and influencers.
An absolute majority agreed on the need of establishing an ethical code and even defining the position of influencer in the Czech environment. The discussion later laid a basis for a third part of the research with three smaller focus groups organised so far (8-10 people each), from which the new Code of Ethics for influencer communication has emerged, setting up the definition of influencer in the Czech environment and the guidelines on how the commercial influencer communication towards the public and marketers is to be regulated.