Representatives of leading market players and industry experts at the online meeting of the IAB Russia Committee on Influencer Marketing discussed the problems of the industry and ways to solve them, as well as the committee's project roadmap.
Influencer Marketing is inextricably linked with the blogosphere, as it is digital influencers and opinion leaders that have become the main channel for promoting goods and services for advertisers today. However, unlike traditional media, bloggers do not have any professional standard or code of ethics, they do not receive special education and are not responsible for the content of their materials, including advertising. These factors lead to significant reputational risks for advertiser companies themselves.
The participants supported the need to solve the problem of a professional and ethical standard for influencers, as well as the inclusion of their activities as a separate profession with inclusion in OKVED (All-Russian Classification of Economic Activities).
“We have mass media on the market, they have certain rights and obligations, but bloggers do not have this. Although now many bloggers form self-employment, IP. I think that the introduction of OKVED will help us regulate what services a blogger should provide,” said Anton Petukhov, head of the working group of the IAB Russia Committee on Influencer Marketing.
His initiative was supported by Ekaterina Gould, CEO and founder of the Digitique.io communication agency.
“I support this initiative, and OKVED is also a very good idea, because, of course, this activity is already both an independent activity and a type of business, and some kind of regulation should still appear. And the sooner this happens, the better,” she said.
Experts stressed that this process must be approached very carefully. First of all, it is necessary to understand who will draw up this standard, what main provisions will be included in it, and most importantly, to establish that the rules should be uniform and apply to all types of agencies that work with bloggers.
The experts also drew attention to the need to develop a specific code of ethics - a set of rules for creating content that would regulate the moral and ethical foundations and work activities of bloggers.
“There are several options for regulating any market: these are state regulation, co-regulation and self-regulation. What is self-regulation? This is regulation based not on laws, but on those codes and self-restrictions that the industry will formulate for itself. This is much better than state regulation, because legislative regulation often cannot cover things of a moral nature or some restrictions that cannot be prescribed in the law, but in self-regulatory organizations, due to the code of ethics, morality, all this can be described,” said the executive director of AKAR Valentin Smolyakov.
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