Advertising culture

In the summer of 2012, Nike became the first company to have its Twitter campaign banned by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) of the United Kingdom (Sweney 2012). The action came as a result of complaints from the public about two particular tweets from footballers Wayne Rooney and Jack Wilshire. The tweets were part of the sportswear manufacturer’s '#makeitcount’ campaign, launched at the beginning of the year to promote a new range of products which included the Nike+ Fuelband, a device which tracks users’ physical activity and automatically sends updates to social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. The campaign urged customers to tweet about their New Year’s resolutions. Rooney’s tweet read: My resolution - to start the year as a champion, and finish it as a champion…#makeitcount gonike.me/makeitcount And Wilshire tweeted: In 2012, I will come back for my club - and be ready for my country. #makeitcount gonike.me/makeitcount The essence of the ruling by the Advertising Standards Authority was that Nike had violated the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations (2008) which prohibits ‘using editorial content in the media to promote a product where a trader has paid for the promotion without making that clear in the content or by images or sounds clearly identifiable by the consumer’. In other words, because the tweets were not clearly identifiable as advertisements, they violated the law. Nike countered that although the footballers were sponsored by the company, they were free as part of the campaign to tweet about their New Year’s resolutions just like the thousands of customers who had sent similar tweets. Besides, they argued, Nike’s sponsorship of Rooney and Wilshire was a well-known fact among their Twitter followers, and the inclusion of the ‘hashtag’ #makeitcount and the address of the campaign’s website made the promotional nature of the tweets obvious. But the ASA disagreed. They contended that the average Twitter user scrolls through many tweets a day and might not make the connection between the hashtag and the campaign. They also pointed out that representatives from Nike had discussed with Rooney and Wilshire the content of their messages before they tweeted them, calling into question their authenticity as spontaneous communications.