YouTube Marketing: Legality of Sponsorship and Endorsements in Advertising
SCMV associate Katrina Wu’s scholarly article YouTube Marketing: Legality of Sponsorship and Endorsements in Advertising was featured in the Journal of Law, Business and Ethics 2016 Spring edition. In addition to the publication, Katrina was invited as a guest speaker to present her paper at the Pacific Southwest Academy of Legal Studies in Business (PSWALSB) 2016 Annual Conference. She received the honor of Best Paper Award at the Conference as a result of her endeavors.
Katrina’s paper presents an expository account of current sponsorship and marketing practices on YouTube and the compliance with Federal disclosure regulations these practices implicate. The form of marketing she addresses in her paper takes the form of endorsement and sponsorships between businesses and YouTube content creators where businesses partner with YouTube content creators to create an advertising message.
In the paper, Katrina demonstrates the effectiveness and potency of YouTube marketing through a hypothetical example supported by real-life numbers. The example shows that businesses reap an impressive return on investment through the use of YouTube marketing.
Given the potency of YouTube marketing, Katrina argues for the urgent need to increase transparency in YouTube endorsement/marketing practices and suggests that there may be social costs associated with inconsistent disclosures of commercial relationships between the YouTube content creator and businesses. She believes that marketing on the YouTube platform can be beneficial for all stakeholders, namely YouTube, YouTube viewers, YouTube content creators, and businesses, so long as there are proper disclosures coupled with an honest and healthy development of commercial relationships.
The abstract of Katarina’s paper is found here.
Her full length paper can be found here.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Seltzer Caplan McMahon Vitek.