Our reading
The finding people misuse
Read carelessly, this paper says disclosure hurts, so disclose as quietly as possible. That is both the wrong reading and, in most markets, illegal.
Read properly, it says something more useful: the damage runs through distrust of the post, not through recognition itself. Recognition was the trigger, but the thing that actually suppressed sharing was the belief that the post was not straight with them. That is the variable you can do something about.
Why the celebrity result is the interesting one
The label moved the needle for the celebrity and not for the brand. That makes sense. Nobody is surprised that a brand's own page is selling; there is no relationship to violate. A person is different. The audience thought they were getting a recommendation and the label reframes it as a transaction.
Which points somewhere specific: the disclosure penalty scales with how much the audience thought this was personal. The creators with the warmest, most parasocial audiences have the most to lose from a post that reads as bought — and they are exactly the creators brands pay the most for.
What we do about it
Disclose clearly, and early. It is required, it is not the source of the damage, and half-hidden labels convert a compliance question into a trust question.
Spend the effort on the post being true. The mechanism here is distrust, and distrust comes from a post that sounds like it was written by the brand. A creator who says what they actually think, including what they do not rate, survives the label. A script does not.
Do not brief a creator to hide the relationship. Beyond the regulatory exposure, it fails on its own terms: audiences increasingly spot it, and an undisclosed ad that gets noticed costs more than a disclosed one ever could.
Expect sharing to take the hit, not attitude. If a campaign is built on organic spread, price the disclosure effect in. If it is built on reach you paid for, it matters much less.
One caution about its age
This is a 2017 study of a labelling practice that was still novel then and is wallpaper now. We would treat the direction as sound and the size as unreliable. Nobody has convincingly re-run it for an audience that has seen a decade of #ad — and if anyone knows of that paper, we would like to read it.
The study above is the work of its authors and is not ours. The summary and commentary on this page are written by Big Bang Story and are our interpretation, not the authors’. We do not host copies of other people’s papers — read it at the source.