Health-conscious consumers confuse Kim in candy-ad chaos

Live by the selfie...

Kim was just trying to do the right thing, according to consumer watchdog group and longtime Kardashian monitoring service Truth in Advertising, Inc. (TINA). In mid-May 2018, the iconic model and influencer threw up an image of herself consuming a lollipop. No big deal, right?

Well, she's a Kardashian, and in her world, photos are often not what they seem. The lollipop was a product of The Flat Tummy Co., a lollipop, shake and tea company that promises that its products help keep women "looking good, feeling fiiiine [sic] and rocking it like the 12/10 that you are."

"Aha!" an ad law junkie might say. "TINA is about to lower the boom on another unidentified advertisement!" Not so fast. Right in the first line of the post, Kim does the right thing and tags the photo as an advertisement. "#ad You guys..." she writes, before going into her pitch (they're "literally unreal," she claims).

Okay, so maybe the prose is nonsensical, but at least she was upfront about her relationship to the company, right?

More Problems

Well, yes. But then things turned sour for a whole other set of reasons. The rumblings began, as they always do, in the comments section. "I'm going to eat nothing but these for a week...Hopefully I get sick so I can sue the pants off her," one wag weighed in. "This is in no way empowering. Choose your platform for less shallow causes," wrote another.

Before too long, Kim was being taken to the woodshed by an internet that was aflame over the unhealthy attitudes that the ad and the product allegedly promoted in our hyper body-conscious culture. (Tori Spelling also caught grief for the same reasons after she promoted the same product on Instagram.)

Just as things were reaching a fever pitch (celebrities AND doctors were weighing in), the ad simply disappeared.

The Takeaway

Did Kim have enough of the uproar? A pang of conscience caused by the endorsement of an allegedly harmful product? No. According to Buzzfeed, Instagram claimed that it had deleted the image by accident. "We mistakenly removed content we shouldn't have and apologized to Kim for the inconvenience caused," an Instagram representative supposedly told Buzzfeed. There was no further explanation offered at the time.

When the image was restored, there was an important difference in the post − the sales pitch was gone.

But so was the #ad tag.

This is the sort of situation that the folks at TINA live for − a perfect case for their "Ad or Not?" feature. The pitch was gone, but so was the tag. How did TINA react to the new version?

It's an ad.

"...those who haven't been following along and only saw the most recent version would be unaware that it's an ad," the organization stated in its post. "Since the company is still prominently tagged in the image, this post requires disclosure."

The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.