ASA Ireland’s New Guidance on Social Media Advertising for Influencers – Winner of the Collaboration Award

14 May 2025

The Best Practice Awards, held every two years, celebrates innovation and excellence in the field of advertising self-regulation. Each month, we will shine a spotlight on a different winning entry. This month, we feature ASA Ireland, which earned the prestigious Collaboration EASA Best Practice Award for its New Guidance on Influencer Advertising and Marketing , which was successfully developed and co-created with the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC) , an Irish State Agency.

More than mere collaboration between ASA Ireland and CCPC

A key goal for ASA Ireland was to create clear, new rules for influencers advertising on social media, ensuring that consumers could instantly recognise advertising on social media, and to increase awareness of what type of content needs to be labelled as advertising.

To do this, ASA Ireland closely collaborated with the CCPC to develop new guidance for social media influencers, brands, and advertisers on how to correctly disclose and label advertising on social media. This required both bodies to find common ground; build on existing ASA Ireland Code rules and principles while ensuring harmony with consumer legislation and Irish national law, which the CCPC has a role in enforcing. This collaboration not only reinforces the strong relationship between the two organisations, but it also allowed both of them to leverage each other’s standing in Ireland to effectively promote the guidance throughout the country.

A needed guidance, as shown by research

Before creating the guidance, ASA Ireland carried out research to understand and compare consumer attitudes towards social media influencer advertising in Ireland as well as to explore consumers’ perception of trust in advertising and the transparency and recognisability of content being advertised. Findings showed that over half of those surveyed were bothered by the lack of transparency in influencer marketing and not being able to identify whether content was advertising or not. Independent research conducted by the CCPC, also revealed that almost 50% of influencer advertising was not labelled or tagged as advertising. 

The Guidance

The guidance provides a simplified approach to labelling advertising on social media. One of the critical points of its creation was to ensure that the new labelling was easy to understand by consumers and influencers/brands. The guidance, therefore, was not only created to educate influencers/brands about what rules they are obliged to follow when advertising on social media but also to give the public tools to identify whether content is advertising or not.

With this objective, the project also included the creation of a new Social Media Reporting Form, which was launched together with the guidance and placed on ASA Ireland’s website. It enables, on the one hand, the public to anonymously report influencers who are not complying with the guidance, which in turn allows ASA Ireland to receive reports of potential non-compliance as well as to have an overview of the content that consumers are viewing and identify where intervention is required.

More collaboration ahead

The success of this partnership has strengthened ASA Ireland and CCPC’s relationship and has positioned the Irish SRO in a good place for future joint endeavours with the government agency and other statutory bodies. In fact, ASA Ireland is already preparing to enter a data-sharing agreement with the CCPC in order to collectively and more efficiently address potential future advertising breaches.