A few months ago I got a call from a brand owner who was furious. Not at me, thankfully. At a creator they’d hired to promote their supplement on TikTok. The creator had gone off script, made a handful of claims about the product that were flatly untrue, and the video had already racked up a couple hundred thousand views before anyone on the brand’s team noticed.
The brand owner wanted to know what they could do. Could they make the creator take it down? Could they sue? Could they report the video to TikTok?
I had to tell him something he didn’t want to hear. Yes, he could try all of those things. But none of them would matter to the FTC. Because in the eyes of the Federal Trade Commission, the brand is responsible for the claims its creators make. Not the creator. The brand. Full stop.
This is the part of influencer marketing that almost nobody talks about, and it’s the part that can genuinely wreck a business in a regulated industry. You can do everything right on your own channels. You can have a perfect compliance process for your ads. You can run every caption through legal. And then one creator goes live with your product and says it cures something, or makes an income claim they can’t substantiate, or forgets to disclose that they were paid, and suddenly you’re the one holding the bag.
I hire creators on behalf of brands every single day. I’ve been doing this for over 13 years. And the number of brands that don’t understand this dynamic is honestly alarming. They think that once they send a product to a creator and agree on a commission, the creator is an independent contractor and whatever they say is their own problem. That is not how it works.
The FTC’s Endorsement Guides, which were updated in 2023 and are being enforced aggressively in 2026, make this very clear. If you have a material connection with someone who endorses your product, you are liable for misleading claims they make. A material connection means you paid them, you gave them free product, you offered them a commission, or any other exchange of value. If any of those things are true, and the creator says something about your product that’s deceptive or unsubstantiated, the FTC can come after you.
Not might come after you. Can, and increasingly does.
The TruHeight case from earlier this year is a perfect example of how seriously the FTC is taking this. TruHeight wasn’t just making unsubstantiated claims about their supplement. They were deploying automated bots operating through fake social media profiles to post fabricated comments on Facebook and Instagram. They were having their own employees write thousands of fake five-star reviews. They were offering free and discounted products in exchange for positive reviews without requiring disclosure. The FTC brought the hammer down, and it was all public. That’s the kind of thing that doesn’t just cost you money. It costs you your reputation.
Now, most brands I work with aren’t doing anything that egregious. But the principle scales down to everyday situations. Let’s say you hire a TikTok affiliate to promote your collagen supplement. You give them the product, agree on a 20% commission, and send them a brief with some talking points. The creator makes a great video, but in their enthusiasm they say something like “I’ve been taking this for two weeks and my joint pain is completely gone.” That’s a health claim. An unsubstantiated one. And it’s now associated with your brand, on a video that’s driving sales through your TikTok Shop.
You might think, well, that’s what they experienced. That’s their honest opinion. And maybe it is. But the FTC doesn’t care about the creator’s personal experience if the claim can’t be backed by competent and reliable scientific evidence. Their guidance is explicit: advertisers should not make claims through consumer testimonials or expert endorsements that would be deceptive or couldn’t be substantiated if the advertiser made them directly. Your creator is speaking on your behalf whether you scripted their words or not.
Then there’s the disclosure issue, which is arguably even more common and just as dangerous. Every creator who has a material connection to your brand needs to disclose that relationship clearly and conspicuously. Not buried in hashtags. Not in tiny text. Not mentioned once at the end of a three-minute video. The FTC’s Disclosures 101 guide says the disclosure has to appear where the audience will see or hear it without searching or guessing.
I’ll be honest, this is something I have to stay on top of constantly with our creators. Even experienced affiliates sometimes forget or get lazy about disclosures. And when they do, it’s not just their problem. It’s my client’s problem. Because the FTC’s position is that the advertiser, meaning the brand, has a responsibility to monitor and enforce compliance among their endorsers. You can’t just hand someone a product and walk away.
So what do you actually do about this? Here’s what we do at Social Impressions, and it’s not complicated. It just requires being intentional.
First, we give every creator a clear brief that includes compliance guidelines alongside the creative direction. Not a 20-page legal document. A simple, plain-English list of what they can and can’t say about the product. We include examples. We show them what a compliant post looks like and what a non-compliant one looks like. We make it as easy as possible for them to get it right. If you want to understand more about how to actually get creators to respond to your outreach in the first place, I covered that in an earlier post.
Second, we tell them explicitly that they need to disclose the partnership. We tell them how. We tell them where in the content the disclosure should appear. We don’t assume they know. Even if they’ve done a hundred brand deals before, we spell it out every time.
Third, we monitor. Not every piece of content in real time, that’s not realistic when you’re running programs with dozens of creators. But we have a review process. We check content after it goes live. If something’s off, we reach out immediately and ask them to edit or take it down. And we document that we did.
That documentation piece matters more than people realize. If the FTC ever does come looking, one of the things they evaluate is whether the advertiser had reasonable procedures in place to monitor and enforce compliance. If you can show that you had guidelines, that you communicated them, that you monitored content, and that you took action when something was wrong, you’re in a much better position than a brand that just threw products at creators and hoped for the best.
The other thing I want to address, because I hear it all the time, is the idea that this only matters for big brands. That the FTC isn’t going to bother with a small supplement company running a handful of TikTok affiliates. And look, enforcement priorities do tend to skew toward larger targets. But the FTC has made it very clear that the rules apply regardless of company size. And more importantly, the platforms themselves are enforcing aggressively. You don’t need the FTC to knock on your door to lose your ad account or your TikTok Shop. The platform can do that all on its own. I wrote about what the FTC expects from supplement brands specifically if you want the full picture on that.
If you’re a brand in a regulated industry using influencers or affiliates, this isn’t optional knowledge. It’s foundational. The brands that build real, sustainable influencer programs are the ones that treat compliance as part of the creative process, not something they think about after a video goes viral for the wrong reasons. If you’re still figuring out whether influencer marketing even makes sense for your business, start there before you worry about compliance. But once you’re in, this is the stuff that keeps you in.
Your creators are an extension of your brand. What they say is what you said. The FTC sees it that way, the platforms see it that way, and eventually your customers will too. Build your programs accordingly.