More than a third of entrepreneurs refused to label ads on the Internet

About 37% of Russian small and medium-sized businesses refused to label advertising on the Internet as required by law, informed RBC with reference to a study by Kokos Group.

According to the group, only 17% of all companies allocate a specialized employee for labeling advertising on the Internet, and 42% hire third-party consultants and experts for this. At the same time, 4% believe that separate advertising services should deal with such marking. Also, every tenth respondent – 9% – does not even know about the emergence of regulations for online advertising, and 5% do not understand the essence of such measures.

In May 2021 to the State Duma made amendments to the law “On Advertising”, providing for the creation of a unified information system for accounting for advertising on the Internet. According to the project document, it was proposed to create a system for collecting, storing, processing and analyzing information about all advertising posted on the Internet.

Then the Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media of the Russian Federation told Vedomosti that the bill “will help increase the transparency and predictability of this segment of the advertising industry” given the rapid growth of the online advertising market.

Initially, it was planned to transfer such data directly to the Ministry of Digital Transformation, but later it was proposed to do this through advertising data operators (ORD), which are selected by Roskomnadzor and act as intermediaries for transferring information to the Unified Internet Advertising Registry (ERIR). As of 2023, such activities permitted for Yandex, VK, Ozon, VimpelCom, etc.

Roskomnadzor told RBCthat most companies label ads and send the necessary information to the ERIR, despite the absence of fines or other penalties that were promised to be introduced on March 1 this year, for refusing to take these actions by entrepreneurs.