Overview

The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has delivered a landmark ruling against Handpicked Media, a collective of independent sites and blogs focusing on fashion, beauty, entertainment, food and culture with a shared aim of promoting goods and sharing content.

Handpicked Media engaged and paid bloggers and members of Twitter to post tweets to promote its clients’ products; effectively to carry out “word of mouth” endorsements/advertising for its clients.

The OFT held that Handpicked Media had breached the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations (2008), and that it had been misleading consumers by not making it apparent that a number of the tweets had been financially endorsed or paid for by producers of the products being promoted.

Mayer Brown discusses the ruling and its implications.

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