Scroll down your Instagram feed and you’ll likely be confronted with people’s babies, heavily filtered selfies with long deep and meaningful captions, and (if you’re anything like us) lots and lots of memes.
But among the friends, family, colleagues and brands you follow, there are the celebs. Some who, like Anne Hathaway have a team to post all their carefully curated content for them, and others like Britney Spears who clearly just posts whatever she wants, whenever she feels like it.
But some of these posts by celebrities are sponsored, meaning they are being paid (usually pretty hefty sums) to post them by brands who want to reach their audiences.
Following a report by the Competition and Markets Authority, 16 celebrities including Alexa Chung, Millie Mackintosh and Zoella have agreed to be more transparent about which social media posts are paid for, and which are organic.
‘Influencers can have a huge impact on what their fans decide to buy’ said Andrea Coscelli, the CMA's chief executive. ‘People could, quite rightly, feel misled if what they thought was a recommendation from someone they admired turns out to be a marketing ploy.
‘You should be able to tell as soon as you look at a post if there is some form of payment or reward involved, so you can decide whether something is really worth spending your hard-earned money on.’
Anyone who has watched the Netflix documentary everyone is talking about at the moment; FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened will understand the true power of sponsored posts. Tickets flew off the virtual shelves after the likes of Bella Hadid, Emily Ratajkowski and Hailey Baldwin posted about the festival on their Instagram feeds.
Kendall Jenner was reportedly paid $250 thousand to post on Instagram offering a Fyre Festival discount code for tickets. But by not declaring that post was an advert, she reportedly landed herself in hot water with the the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and was also named in a lawsuit filed against Fyre organisers and ‘ambassadors’.