▲ | braiamp 20 hours ago | |
This isn't a Mr Beast problem, it's a industry problem: > Frontiers: How Much Influencer Marketing Is Undisclosed? Evidence from Twitter > We study the disclosure of influencer posts on Twitter across a large set of brands based on a unique data set of over 100 million posts and a novel classification method to detect undisclosed sponsorship. Using our preferred empirical specification, we find that 96% of sponsored posts are not disclosed. This result is robust to a series of specification tests, and even a lower-bound classification still yields an undisclosed share of 82%. Despite stronger enforcement of disclosure regulations, the share of undisclosed posts decreases only slightly over time. *Compared with disclosed posts, undisclosed posts tend to be associated with young brands with a large Twitter following. Using an online survey, we find that many consumers are not able to identify sponsored content without disclosure.* Our findings highlight a potential need for further regulatory scrutiny and suggest that researchers studying influencers must account for undisclosed sponsored content. https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mksc.2024.083... Now, one could argue that Mr Beast has the means to properly disclose these issues. |