British footballers Jack Wilshere and Wayne Rooney recently tweeted about their resolution to #makeitcount, a new Nike campaign slogan. However, in the process of making it count, they forgot to make it sponsored:
The advertising watchdog Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) took heed to the tweets as they failed to make the sponsorship clear and “obviously identifiable.” The ASA stated the following about the #Nike tweets:
“We considered there was nothing obvious in the tweets to indicate they were Nike marketing communications.”
The tweets were found to breach the advertising code and can no longer appear. All future ads from Nike will require easily identifiable messaging to alert users to the nature of the Tweet, such as including “#ad” in the Tweet.
For more information see the Guardian.
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