Creator partnerships that are disclosed, contracted and checked

They differ by market but they point the same way: if there is a material connection between a brand and a creator — payment, free product, commission, an ongoing relationship — the audience has to be told clearly and up front. In the United States that sits under the Federal Trade Commission’s endorsement guides; in the United Kingdom the Advertising Standards Authority applies the CAP Code; in Canada the Competition Bureau addresses it under deceptive marketing provisions; in Australia the ACCC applies consumer law.

The practical standard is consistent across all of them: the label must be visible without tapping to expand a caption, in plain language rather than an ambiguous abbreviation, and present on every post in a series rather than only the first.

We work to these requirements as a matter of practice, but we are not lawyers and this is not legal advice. Clients confirm their obligations with their own counsel, and we build the campaign around whatever that advice says.

Not in a way that justifies hiding it. Audiences already assume that a creator posting about a brand has an arrangement with it, so a clear label mostly confirms what they suspected.

What does damage performance is a partnership that is obviously commercial and unlabelled, because it costs the creator credibility with the audience — and that credibility was the entire thing you were paying for.

By looking at things that are hard to fake. Comment substance rather than comment count, whether the audience geography matches the market you sell in, follower growth patterns without unexplained jumps, and whether the creator has posted about this subject before or is a stranger to it.

We also ask the creator directly for their own analytics, including a screen recording rather than an exported image, and treat a refusal as an answer. This is done before a fee is agreed, not after.

Because it measures attention accumulated in the past, not influence available now. A creator with fifteen thousand followers who has covered your category for years will usually outperform one with three hundred thousand followers whose audience arrived for something unrelated.

Follower count is also the number easiest to inflate, which makes it the number least worth paying for. Relevance, audience composition and the quality of the comments predict results considerably better.

Whitelisting is an arrangement where the creator authorises the brand to run advertising from the creator’s own account, so the ad appears under their name rather than the brand’s. Creator-licensed content is the related arrangement where the brand runs the creator’s content from its own account.

Both are worth agreeing in the original contract rather than later. Deciding after a post has performed well means renegotiating from a weak position, and the incremental cost at contract stage is usually small compared with the cost of commissioning the content again.

You can, and gifting is still a material connection that has to be disclosed. Free product in exchange for coverage is not exempt from disclosure requirements in any of the markets we work in.

Gifting also buys you far less control. There is no contract, no usage rights, no agreed timing and no obligation to post at all, which makes it a reasonable seeding tactic and a poor foundation for a campaign you need to plan around.