The Advertising Standards Authority for Ireland will be clamping down on influencers to ensure they are abiding by the advertising code.
According to research carried out by the ASAI, 63% of consumers are ‘concerned’ by influencers who are not operating with full transparency and are therefore not ‘authentic.’
Nearly 60% of respondents said they trust official brand advertisements over those they see coming from influencer profiles.
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Speaking about the changes coming into effect, Orla Twomey, Chief Executive of the ASAI, told Newstalk’s Breakfast Briefing what this will mean.
She said: "We're living in a world of social media and of tech, so it's about using tech tools to capture information, to assess it and then to send results to the human users to determine whether or not there are breaches of the code.
"We're going to be working with the CCPC to develop additional guidance about what is required for disclosure.
"I think we'll end up with just a very few, clear simple words that can be used.
"Then we will do a monitoring to see - once we've gone out and informed people - whether or not people are actually adhering to that".
This new technology will be used to identify which influencers and the brands they work with are disclosing advertisement information in the correct way.
If they’re found not in compliance with the code, a formal investigation will be launched and the influencers involved will be ‘named and shamed’ for abusing the trust of their followers.
"The tools will be able to provide us with a snapshot in time, and we'll be able to identify whether or not influencers and brands that they work with are disclosing correctly," Ms Twomey said.
"If they're not, we'll engage with them to try and bring them into compliance with the code.
"If that doesn't work, then we will do formal investigation where they will be named and shamed as not disclosing properly and abusing - I suppose - the trust that their followers have in them, and the trust that the brand's audience have.
"It is all about trust".
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