Digital spaces like Instagram use product policies to dictate what can, and can’t, happen on their sites. Anthill Collective worked with Instagram to design policies that require digital creators to disclose when a brand is paying them to post—a first-of-its-kind policy that reshaped the branded content industry by setting a new bar for transparency in advertising.
Client
Sector
Technology
Policy analysis
Policy co-design
Sector mapping
Our services
Project goals
Our goal was ambitious—to co-design industry leading digital policies for sponsored content. These policies aimed to bring more transparency to social media, helping people on Instagram know when the content they see is sponsored, and understand who’s paying.
Outcomes
Policies that defined an industry. Our product policy recommendations were adopted by Instagram, leading to the creation of innovative policies that clearly distinguish between organic and sponsored content, elevating the platform's transparency for its users. This sparked a ripple effect, starting a broader industry shift towards more honest and transparent communication in digital advertising.
At a time when social media marketing was rapidly reshaping the landscapes of advertising and brand partnership, policies regulating brand advertising were nonexistent. The concept of a brand paying a creator to post content on social media was brand new. Most people seeing paid posts had no idea they were paid—there was no precedent in the industry for how to regulate this type of content, and no precedent for where the industry would head.
Instagram tapped Anthill Collective’s Director and co-founder, Brittany Noel Taylor, to partner with them on designing policy solutions to this. First, we needed to work closely with content creators to understand their practices, as well as their needs. Then, we needed to hop across the fence, understanding the drivers of brands sponsoring this content.
Designing policies for transparency.
Any policies we designed also needed to take into account future industry and regulatory changes, to make sure they were sustainable for the longterm. We partnered with Instagram’s legal team to understand and analyse U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) rulings and opinions related to the new sponsored content industry. We used these learnings to future-forecast likely regulatory changes, and used this mapping to design policies in a way that served as a foundation that could flex to regulatory shifts.
Pulling from each of these learnings, we worked with Instagram to designed policies that would brought unprecedented transparency to the sponsored content industry. This partnership was not just about setting benchmarks, it was about building new transparency, and new rules for honesty, in the digital sphere.
Social media, made honest.
In our collaboration with Instagram our goal was simple: make the platform and, hopefully, the wider industry more transparent and honest. We developed clear policies to help users easily spot the difference between organic posts and paid ads. This project wasn't just about bringing clarity to Instagram's users—it was about setting a new standard for authenticity across all social media platforms, encouraging a shift towards more honest interactions online. By regulating the world’s largest social media platform, we successfully set a precedent that rippled new transparency rules throughout the industry.