The IPM – the trade body representing UK agencies, service companies and brands engaged in promotional marketing and brand activation – is delighted to announce a series of member-only Legal Briefing webinars throughout 2020. The webinars will be hosted by Mani Roberts, the IPM’s Regulatory Affairs Manager, and feature podcast-style discussion and debate with topic experts, including from the ASA/CAP, DMA, brands, agencies and independent experts, as well as a live Q&A.

The 2020 schedule currently features*:

• Tuesday January 21^st @ noon: Brexit and the implications for trade and compliance

• Tuesday February 25^th @ noon: Summer of sport – the dos and don’ts

• Tuesday April 21^st @ noon: E-privacy laws and GDPR

• Tuesday June 16^th @ noon: Equality and gender stereotyping

• Tuesday August 11^th @ noon: Influencer marketing and Instagram best practice

• Tuesday October 13^th @ noon: Focus on Scotland

• Date to be confirmed: HFSS part 2

Mani Roberts, Regulatory Affairs Manager at the IPM, said: “At the IPM we take great pride in being able to not only write your t&cs and provide compliance advice on your activations, but also sharing and contributing to the debate and discussion on key issues within our industry. This is what this series of wide-ranging Legal Briefing webinars will achieve.”

Paul Cope, Managing Director of the IPM, added: “IPM membership comes with a wide range of benefits, from awards to training, access to Advertising Association initiatives and auto-enrolment into our Communities scheme, but our knowledge and leadership in all areas of activation compliance has always been at the heart of what we do. We’re very excited to announce this series of knowledge sharing and debate platforms available exclusively to our members.”

To see the latest full calendar and register your interest for one or more of the webinars, click here.

If you are interested in hearing more about IPM membership, click here.

* Dates, times and topics are subject to change. Click here for the latest details.

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The IPM is delighted to announce Mani Roberts as it’s new Regulatory Affairs Manager.

Mani grew up in West London and studied at the University of Westminster. After graduating and working in film and television production at the BBC Mani moved to the British Film Institute to work in rights and contracts.

The negotiating experience he gained there led him into a career in compliance and regulatory affairs beginning at Clearcast, before moving in-house at a leading retail brand as Compliance Manager. The skills developed both there and at Clearcast led to Mani accepting the position of Regulatory Affairs Manager at the IPM where he will continue to develop his career.

Paul Cope, Managing Director of the IPM, said: “Mani comes to the IPM with an impeccable pedigree, both from the pure compliance and commercial worlds. I’m excited to work with him to develop the IPM’s Legal Advisory Service, especially the European Review & Approval Service which we’ll be developing for the impending post-Brexit trading conditions.”

Mani added: “Joining the IPM at such an interesting time for the industry is a wonderful opportunity and I very much look forward to getting involved with the self-regulatory process at the ASA, not to mention working with – and meeting – as many of our members as possible.”

Mani will be the point of contact for all European and UK brand activation and promotional marketing compliance enquiries at the IPM. He can be contacted via Legal@theipm.org.uk or on 020 3848 0447

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Regulations governing how social media influencers advertise products online are confusing and unclear, with the UK public overwhelmingly believing the system should be more transparent, new research reveals.

The comprehensive survey into influencer marketing was carried out on behalf of Prizeology, a prize promotions agency specialising in promotional regulation and compliance. The survey looked at how the public perceive rules and regulations around influencer marketing.

The research, carried out on 2,015 members of the general public, looked at influencer marketing on social media platforms covering Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest. It overwhelmingly revealed a worrying lack of knowledge around the rules governing advertising by influencers.

A huge majority – 71% of people – wrongly believe that there are no regulations surrounding influencer marketing. Nearly two-thirds (61%) believe that influencers do not have to state that they have been paid to talk about a product – which is incorrect, because under consumer protection legislation, influencers must state if they are being paid to promote a brand’s products. The CAP Code, the code of conduct which is part of the UK’s self-regulatory system covering advertising and marketing in the UK, reflects and reinforces the legal position, and a number of complaints against brands have been upheld by industry regulator the Advertising Standards Authority for insufficient clarity in publicising commercial relationships with bloggers, vloggers and other social media influencers.

Half (49%) of the UK public were unaware of the relevant language or tags like #ad which are supposed to appear on paid-for posts to show that paid-for product promotion is involved; 33% of these were young people aged between 18-24, which suggests consumer confusion is not restricted to the older age brackets.

The research also clearly showed that the general public believes that they should be informed if people are being paid to promote products: 88% of the survey sample agreed with this statement, with 60% agreeing that their perception of a brand is improved when they are transparent about product promotion.

Sarah Burns, Managing Director of Prizeology and an expert on compliance and regulation in the promotional marketing sector, says: “The results are extremely interesting and overwhelmingly show a shocking lack of knowledge and confusion amongst all age groups – including teenagers – about the way that brands use social media influencers to advertise their products.”

Well over two-thirds (71%) of those questioned felt that more should be done to force disclosure.

Brands are also in danger of having their reputations damaged by lack of transparency, with 44% of those surveyed saying they felt that influencer marketing is damaging and 66% of people agreeing that their perception of a brand improved when they were transparent about product placement. Burns comments: “This should be a wake-up call to brands to make sure that they are acting within the rules when working with influencers. The public do not want to be duped and brands could suffer as a result.”

She concludes: “It is clear that this is an area of promotion that is growing rapidly, and the regulations need to be enforced more rigorously to keep pace with its growth. Now is the time to take action. I know the Advertising Standards Authority has committed to comprehensive education and enforcement this year, and our research shows that this would be welcomed by consumers.”

The survey of 2,015 people, representative of the UK by age, gender and region, was conducted by Vitreous World Ltd for Prizeology between January 30th and February 2^nd 2018. A white paper and full breakdown of the survey and results can be downloaded from the Prizeology website.

Prizeology is a prize promotions agency working with brands to engage customers. It specialises in compliance and best practice and helps brands and businesses run prize promotions which stick to the rules and regulations.

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Sarah Burns of Prizeology has some words of wisdom on how to run prize promotions campaigns on social media that comply with UK law and the CAP Code

I love social media. I love social media because it enriches what leisure time I have in oh so many ways, especially when it comes to watching skateboarding dogs; but also because it’s brilliant for prize promotions, which is what I fill my working days with.

YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest – they all have their merits and indeed their quirks, but I like these platforms because, unless you don’t understand how the channel works and get the mechanic completely wrong, the audience is almost always engaged and responsive.

Also, because these are still new and evolving spaces, promoters can be innovative – although, of course, they can’t make up their own rules, because each platform has its own acceptable use policies and guidelines for promotions.

Facebook, for instance, insists prize draws must be run through an app within Facebook or a business page, not a personal profile, while Instagram says you mustn’t ask people to tag themselves in photos if they aren’t actually in the pic. A competition in which the most retweets wins breaches Twitter guidelines and you can’t permit multiple entries to a Pinterest promotion or ask entrants to re-pin a specific image.

If you don’t follow these platform guidelines for promotions your account or – much worse – your client’s account is at risk of being shut down. It goes without saying that I don’t want one of the primary ways in which my client engages with its customers to be blocked.

I see it as my responsibility because my company makes full use of our clients’ business logins to monitor their social media campaigns. We answer queries, review the stats and check the promotion is being seen. Facebook’s recent algorithm change now means giveaways, for instance, might not always appear organically in feeds and brands will need to pay to boost their posts in order to gain visibility, so that presents a new challenge.

In addition to these site-specific idiosyncrasies, online prize promotions must abide by the regulations and laws of the land. Like all non-broadcast promotional marketing in the UK, social media prize draws are regulated by the CAP Code (the self-regulatory code which governs advertising and marketing in the UK), so they must have clear terms and conditions. These can be abridged – Twitter is still a tight squeeze although it’s slightly easier now there are 280 characters to play with – but the full and frank version should never be more than a single click away. If your promotion is global, take care, because different countries have different rules and what’s legal here isn’t necessarily legal elsewhere.

Whatever platform you use, you have to be able to pull all the entry data if you’re asked for it and prove that your prizes have been awarded fairly, so you need an app or program for doing this. On platforms like Twitter and Instagram, as well as asking entrants to use a specific hashtag, get them to tag your brand, as this helps you sort people who have actively entered your prize draw from those who have coincidentally used the same hashtag.

You also need a verification process to ensure entrants are who they claim to be, own the content they’ve entered and haven’t broken any other terms and conditions.

If you rely on notifying your winners by naming them in a Facebook post or tagging them on Instagram, you can’t guarantee they’ll see that post or, if they do, it might be months later, by which time you’ll have given the prize to someone else. People really do set up fake accounts simply to claim prizes, so always contact winners privately. On Twitter, for example, this may mean asking them to follow you so you can direct-message them.

Best practice on social media means running effective but compliant promotions. I would be mortified if a consumer complained to the ASA about a promotion I had run. But more than that, non-compliance, including by social media influencers who fail to make the correct disclosures of any commercial relationship with the brands they are promoting, undermines consumer trust and damages the promotional marketing industry as a whole, so following platform guidelines and adhering to the law benefits us all.

I am out to spread the love, because although I do love social media, I also love compliance too – and I don’t care who knows it!

Sarah Burns is Founder of Prizeology, a consultancy specialising in the management and implementation of all aspects of prize promotions, on both strategic and tactical levels. Prizeology is one of the Headline Sponsors of Connect 2018, the IPM’s Members Networking Event which is taking place on Wednesday 31st January. For more information about Connect 2018, see the IPM website.

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Promotions are complex processes, and to get them right you must impose rigorous control on all elements of the activity, says Neil Barnes of Enable Promotional Marketing

All it takes is one promotion to go wrong to seriously damage a brand’s reputation – even today, there are UK consumers who remember the Hoover Free Flights fiasco from 1992.

Currently, Cadbury is feeling the pain on their “Hunt for the White Creme Egg” promotion that is being widely criticised, where consumers are urged to find a rare White Creme Egg to win. Sounds simple; however, it has been widely reported that consumers and retail staff have been spotted peeling back the foil wrapper, then putting the egg back. Some claim the white egg has different ingredients listed to the standard one, which could give the game away.

This isn’t anything like the scale of the Hoover disaster; but it is a major embarrassment for the brand, with the potential for the risk of product recall on tampering grounds.

Nobody compliments brands, agencies and all the other service providers who work on a brilliantly successful campaign; but all it takes is one poorly executed campaign to create a social media storm and damage the reputation of all of us who work in promotional marketing.

Consumers used to complain to the newspapers and television consumer TV programmes; not any more. Today, the customers drive the news agenda, sharing their complaints not just with their social network in the UK but around the world via Twitter, Facebook and other social platforms to highlight faults with a promotion.

The truth is, no well-run promotion should ever lead to the product being compromised or complaints that the activation is vulnerable to the unscrupulous.

To run successful promotions, the devil is in the detail; and that detail involves an integrated approach which incorporates compliance, security and logistic tasks with capability and knowledge in all areas of expertise from initial print and production, supply chain, legal and on into areas such as digital.

At Enable, we’ve developed a process which we call Operational Management – other people will call it something else, but what you call it doesn’t matter, so long as you include it in your promotions.

Promotions are complex and involve many different tasks; to manage them properly you must start with an expert team that sees and understands the complete picture. A promotion must be planned in its entirety, not piecemeal. You can’t just take a few services and cobble them together.

If things go wrong, it usually stems from a lack of understanding of the complexities of the subject and of the rigorous management controls and monitoring necessary to achieve a successful implementation.

Work out what should happen in any promotion, and then look at everything that could go wrong. Explore even scenarios which are highly unlikely – it’s only by being prepared for the worst, not hoping for the best, that we can ensure a smooth path to success.

All stakeholders should be involved in the planning from as early as possible. Partnership and collaborative working are vital to success. This is even more important when a promotion is being delivered or supported via a variety of media channels and technical disciplines, when a promotion is being run with different retail partners (particularly if some of them have tailored versions of the promotion) and when a promotion is being run in more than one country.

You must bring in experts on compliance, security and logistics to work alongside the marketing and creative teams. In an ideal world, everyone working on a promotion should be a member of the Institute of Promotional Marketing and fully up to speed on promotional best practice.

The total collaboration of Operational Management and creative should ensure that attention to detail combined with the creative artistry works cohesively for the perfect promotion. Without these two in partnership, no matter how beautiful something looks, or how clever it is, if it doesn’t work or if it backfires, the creativity will be overlooked by disappointed customers.

We’ve helped run promotions where some of the ingredients were changed to indicate a winning pack. We engaged packaging and specialist legal experts and involved them from the start, providing a solution where you simply just change the wording on all promotional packs to include the details for the special ingredient as well as for the normal product.

Thankfully, many brands are becoming more aware of the risk to their reputations from poorly-executed promotions, and are seeking support from operational experts in order to protect the integrity of the promotion or the product.

However, for every brand that understands the need for the highest levels of operational control, there are still far too many that ask what they need this level of attention to detail for. Often, it’s only when a catastrophic failure is detected and prevented by following the right operational procedures that these clients understand the harsh realities of the marketing world today.

The goal should be to ensure that every promotion is enjoyed fairly and honestly by consumers, while protecting brands from the detrimental harm of ‘operational blunders’ and inexperienced or unconsidered implementation of a project.

Whether you are the marketing director, the brand manager, or work for the creative agency or a service provider, your goal should always be the same: to protect and safeguard the reputation of the promotion, the brand, the company, and the marketing industry.

The reputational and financial risk of a poorly executed promotion can be enormous. In some cases, in the past these have made a brand toxic and devalued it in the eyes of consumers.

It is only by meticulous planning, attention to detail and asking the question “what if?” when you consider every single stage that you will end with a promotion that works for all.

Neil Barnes founded Enable in 1993, and the company is celebrating its 25^th anniversary in 2018. Enable is acknowledged in the industry as expert in ensuring promotional marketing campaigns meet best practice, are legal and compliant with UK marketing codes, free from fraud or theft and are logistically sound.

Enable works with FMCG companies, suppliers, digital solutions agencies, printers, insurance companies, and creative promotional marketing agencies alike, assisting in the smooth running of their promotional marketing campaigns and helping implement protective measures against fraudulent entry or other activity which could damage the integrity of a promotion.

Enable is a member of the IPM, and is an IPM Education and Training ‘Module Hero’, supporting the IPM Diploma in Promotional Marketing.

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