A whopping one quarter of all Instagram posts viewed in connection with a recent advertising probe were found to be advertisements, but just 35 percent were labelled as such. That is what the British Advertising Standards Authority recently discovered after assessing nearly 25,000 posts on the Facebook, Inc-owned social media platform, prompting the advertising watchdog to contact all of the social influencers involved (all of which had already been on the agency’s enforcement radar) and a number of brands, “putting them ‘on notice’ that future breaches could lead to them being publicly named and shamed” for running afoul of the United Kingdom’s advertising code.

In furtherance of a quest to crackdown on such an “unacceptable” level of non-compliance with the UK Code of Non-broadcast Advertising, Sales Promotion and Direct Marketing, which mandates that “marketing communications must not mislead the consumer by omitting material information” – i.e., information that “a consumer needs to make informed decisions in relation to a product,” British Advertising Standards Authority (“ASA”) chief executive Guy Parker asserted in a statement this week there is “simply is no excuse not to make clear when positive messages in posts have been paid for by a brand.”