Schiffrin describes city media contracts and lack of record keeping
Schiffrin says the city works with advertising and marketing agencies under citywide media placement contracts that identify and hire influencers, issue contracts and payments, and monitor impact, but there is secrecy around hiring and payment, no systemic record keeping of content creators, and unclear regulations.
Where I think it's important to take a real close look is the City of New York works with a group of advertising and marketing agencies that place advertisements on behalf of city agencies and manage influencer relationships
under the citywide media placement contracts.
This relationship management can include identifying and hiring influencers, issuing contracts and payments, working with the influencers on the content they deliver, and monitoring the impact of that content.
Some information is available in City.
documents online, but in general there's quite a bit of secrecy regarding the hiring and payment of these messengers.
There is no systemic record keeping that we could find of the content creators hired by city agencies.
And we found that, just as we saw today, that many of the regulations governing influence relationships are unknown and unclear.
We found a lack of standards as to disclosure and transparency and a lack of knowledge about what laws, if any, apply.
And this, by the way, seems to be a universal problem.
When the EU did a sweep of influencers a couple years ago, I cite that in my paper, they also found that mostly people didn't know what the laws were and were not following the disclosure laws.
So this is not just us.