Navigating Highly Regulated Industries with Influencers

Fluential was born in a tightly regulated industry. Insurance. That’s right, our first client, Adrian Flux, face some of the toughest restrictions of all brands in the UK. It can make marketing a challenge for them at times, but by working closely together, we’ve been able to stay in the good books for the past 7 years. Let’s explore how.

The FCA are particularly hot on the influencer world right now, and so they should be. There is an abundance of terrible advice out there, disguising itself as life-changing hacks that will catapult you to financial freedom. Every day, we see influencers promoting the illegal practice of “fronting” and other methods to keep car insurance costs down, with no real knowledge of just how bad this all is.

Adrian Flux came to us wanting to be different to many other brands that turned a blind eye to this sort of thing. Compliance is a huge priority for them and it instantly became one for us too.

So let’s take a look at a few of the methods we use to make sure we don’t fall foul of the rules.

To make this more digestible, we’ll break it down into a list:

1. A dated, and always updated, approval log of every single piece of influencer content, with details on which official representative approved the content, or denied the content – and the reason why if so. These records are crucial to keep us within the rules.
2. Ensuring both we, and the client, see content after amends are made, even if it’s as simple as removing just a few words. If the content has changed, it needs to be checked again, and needs to go into the approval log again.
3. The FCA’s rules baked into our briefs, created in collaboration with those in the know on the client-side. Many influencer briefs focus on what to say, which potentially exposes you to influencers, perhaps even with the best will in the world, saying things they shouldn’t. We include a full list of terms and statements they cannot say or make.
4. Thoroughly vetting each influencer before they make it to this stage to check for any historic FCA rule breaking. It doesn’t matter if you’re not breaking their rules in our sponsored content. If you’re breaking the rules either side of our ad going live, you’re not working with our client.
5. Checking more than just the sponsored section of the content. If we receive a 30 minute YouTube video, but the client mention only takes up 60 seconds, that means there’s potentially 29 minutes where issues could arise. To optimise our time spent on this, we’ve built our own AI powered tool that scans for obvious AI rule breaks and alerts us instantly, before then watching the video at 2x speed (to improve efficiency) ourselves regardless of the tool’s outcome.

Whilst some of those individual steps may sound daunting, they’re easier to implement than you’d think. Once you get in the swing of adhering to them, it becomes second nature.

So if you’re in a tightly regulated industry, and would love to explore influencer marketing but have always felt as though it’s not worth the risk, perhaps we could help you in the same way that we’ve been helping 3 different insurance clients now for the past 7 years.