New data has revealed that an explicit ad disclosure does not harm engagement on social posts.
Research published by HypeAuditor and the Influencer Marketing Trade Body (IMTB) on 12 Feb shows that Instagram posts tagged #ad generated more comments and likes on average than commercial content that did not use an ad disclosure hashtag.
‘Disclosure doesn’t just protect creators — it actively benefits brands,’ commented IMTB chair Emma Harman.
This is not the first research to find that ad disclosures do not curtail engagement. A meta-analysis published in Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science last year found no significant direct effects of sponsorship disclosure on marketing outcomes.
A spokesperson for HypeAuditor and IMTB suggested that viewers see the disclosure as a sign of ‘credibility and legitimacy’, and makes them more likely to engage with the post — particularly when coming from ‘large scale creators with over 500k Instagram followers’. This argument was backed by Shahriar Coupal, the Advertising Standards Authority’s director of advertising policy and practice, who said: ‘We know from our own research that the public want and expect influencers to disclose when their content is an ad.’
This idea was referenced in the 2025 meta-analysis, but researchers still observed ‘no significant effects for sponsorship disclosure’.
It is possible that the effects of sponsorship disclosure come in part from the different products being advertised. In the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science study, sponsorship disclosure was found to have a stronger positive impact when the product in question was self-expressive than when it was functional. HypeAuditor and IMTB’s study looked at 583,000 sponsored posts from 116,000 creators, likely representing a large swathe of different types of products, but the nature of these products was not disclosed in the report.
Neither study found any evidence that sponsorship disclosure had a negative effect on engagement, potentially assuaging concerns long held by the industry.
