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Living in an era of digital revolutions around every corner can be incredibly tricky. As technology and practices shift, we are asked to adapt and grow to the changing landscape of business, science, healthcare, advertising, and more. In this new digital era, it can be extremely challenging to understand the differences between fake and real information, false and factual statistics, and misleading and truthful advertising. Over my past 4 years at the School of Communication at SFU, I learned so much about marketing and advertising. As I approach graduation, I thought it would be important to share some of that knowledge in the hopes that when people log into social media, they know a bit more about the tactics being used to market to them. 

One of the best things you can do in today's day and age is to become media literate. With the ever-circulating media circus, it can be overwhelming, and at times, it may feel like you will never know enough so that you can distinguish between a scam and a truthful ad. But the more you know, the easier it will be to understand the difference and use that knowledge to your advantage.

First, we must look at the general definitions of advertising and marketing to identify their differences. Marketing can be looked at as the 鈥渂igger picture鈥濃�搃t is a practice that involves individuals . Complementing that is advertising, which focuses on getting the message out through . In this blog, I鈥檒l be focusing on social media sites that are used as the location for advertising and the marketing targets, who are the consumers consuming the content. 

Advertisements come in many forms, even on social media. On platforms such as Instagram and Tik Tok, you can run into advertisements that stop your scrolling or come after a story/post. These advertisements are explicitly labeled as such and are paid for by companies to take up that advertisements space. This type of advertising is technically the 鈥渕ost ethical鈥� because people can tell the image/video is trying to sell them something, and they can choose to scroll away or click on it. But the phenomenon of influencer advertising is where the waters become muddier. 

has a strict law surrounding influencer marketing, known as the 鈥淐ompetition Act鈥�. The Act outlines regulations that digital influencers and companies must follow to ensure transparency for consumers. Among these rules is the need for disclosures on paid posts by the influencer doing the advertisement. This disclosure must be as visible as possible and cannot be in a long caption or a group of hashtags. Additionally, the Act outlines that disclosures must be clear and contextually appropriate, specifying that using a discount code or linking to a webpage is usually not enough transparency for most audiences.  

With this law in place, consumers should feel some comfort in knowing influencers and businesses will be held accountable for false or deceiving advertising. Unfortunately, we do not see the implementation of this law nearly as much as we should, and many influencers, companies, and social media sites choose not to comply with the standards set in place. 

The most common form of labelling when it comes to advertising on social media is a at the end of the caption. Something as simple as 鈥�#BUSINESSNAMEpartner鈥� is considered enough of a disclosure by both the companies and influencers to be labeled as a paid partnership. But this is not enough under the Competition Act's guidelines, and to me, this lack of transparency shows how little influencers respect their audience. People deserve to know what they are watching and if a person is being paid for the post they are viewing. 

I think it鈥檚 important to analyze the monetary gain that these influencers receive since it could be incentivizing unethical practices. Here鈥檚 the : influencers with over 500,000 followers can make $10000+ per post, those with over 100000 followers can make between $5000-$10000, over 10000 followers $500-$5000, and over 500 followers means $100-$500 per post. With these types of numbers, some influencers may feel motivated to lie about a product, claiming that they 鈥渓ove it鈥� and 鈥渦se it all the time鈥� even if that is not true.

One example of this phenomenon happened in 2023, and it basically broke the internet. Popular beauty influencer, Mikayla Nogueira, , claiming that the mascara "changed her life" and made it seem like she had on "false lashes". But quickly, people online began speculating that she had actually applied fake lashes to make it seem like the mascara had made them extremely full. Along with this way of deceiving the viewer, she also only put "L鈥橭real Paris Partner鈥� for a few seconds in incredibly small text on the screen to disclose that the post was a paid partnership. Later, instead of taking down the post and apologizing, Mikayla decided to keep the video up, adding some hashtags and the 鈥減aid partnership鈥� tag that Tik Tok provides to creators. I believe that ethically (and in some cases, legally), this influencer should have originally added these tags, but instead, she decided to try and convince her followers that it wasn鈥檛 a paid partnership. Instances like this show the need for better and well-enforced legislation against deceitful advertising and marketing by both companies and influencers. 

So, what can we do about this? 

Well, for those of us who use social media, the first step is to become more educated on this topic. We are the ones who are consumers, bringing companies their business, so we should have a greater say on how advertisements are being shown to us. Encouraging companies to keep ethical marketing practices, and pushing back when they don鈥檛, can be a step towards fixing the landscape of social media advertising. On a smaller scale, we can be vigilant by checking hashtags and looking for small text indicating that what we鈥檙e watching is an advertisement.

The importance of ethical social media marketing cannot be understated. Consumers are engaging with content daily that may contain hidden advertisements without them knowing. By becoming aware of these marketing tactics, we can create a more educated consumer culture that is knowledgeable of the ethics of advertising and the motivation behind influencers promoting products.