The authorities want to ban advertising on foreign agents’ resources
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A bill has been introduced to the State Duma that would prohibit advertising on foreign agents’ resources and their promotion in the media. The purpose of these changes is said to be “countering covert foreign interference.” Experts believe that the restriction will have almost no effect on the advertising market as a whole; foreign agents occupy no more than 1% of it. However, the industry expects other tightening, in particular, Russian companies will officially not be able to advertise on prohibited social networks.
A group of deputies led by State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin contributed the draft amendments to the laws on “persons under foreign influence”, “On advertising”, “On the media”, follows from the document card on the parliament website, published on February 15. The project prohibits the distribution of advertising by foreign agents, as well as the promotion of their own information resources in the media.
The explanatory note to the document states that, according to the Ministry of Justice, in 2023, more than 200 Russian individuals and legal entities placed advertisements for their goods and services on the resources of foreign agents. The new bill is proposed to be adopted “in order to counter such hidden foreign interference in the internal political affairs of the state.”
According to the Association of Bloggers and Agencies (ABA) for 2023, the total income of the ten largest YouTube bloggers amounted to about 1.2 billion rubles.
Among them, in particular, Yuri Dud, Maxim Kats and Ekaterina Shulman, recognized as foreign agents, their total income for the past year amounted to 221.9 million rubles.
According to ABA data for 2022, the total influencer marketing market reached 50 billion rubles. with the income of the ten largest foreign agent bloggers amounting to 500 million rubles.
The current bill is only the first of initiatives to regulate the advertising market that are planned to be adopted this year. Thus, during a meeting of experts from the Regional Public Center for Internet Technologies with the blogging community at the Russia exhibition on February 15, Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, IT and Communications Anton Gorelkin said that “a bill banning Russian companies from advertising on banned social networks is already ready.” The deputy announced the document in his Telegram channel.
Anton Gorelkin also noted that he plans to raise with Roskomnadzor the issue of banning bloggers from inviting people to subscribe to their accounts in foreign banned social networks. In his opinion, “from March 1, such calls can be regarded as the popularization of means of bypassing blocking, because without them it will not be possible to subscribe to someone on a prohibited social network.”
“Behind the scenes, there is already a ban on being hosted by foreign agents,” say the communications agency PR Development. They added that the vast majority of their clients did not consider advertising integrations with foreign agents anyway.
A Kommersant source in the market expects that those advertisers who are currently placing advertisements with foreign agents and on blocked social networks will “distribute them through authorized channels.”
“They will increase advertising budgets for bloggers in other social networks, as well as in OLV formats (inserts into videos on video hosting sites and social networks.— “Kommersant”) and banner advertising,” believes Kommersant’s interlocutor. In his opinion, “the market as a whole will hardly notice the ban.”
Timur Akhmedov, head of the ABA project team, agrees that the adoption of the law “will have virtually no financial impact on the influencer marketing market.” “Foreign agent bloggers are a small percentage of the total number of domestic bloggers; they can be counted in the dozens,” he explains. “Russian companies with state participation rarely advertise anything with foreign agents. If the law comes into force, companies will follow it, that is, foreign agents will only have foreign advertisers.”
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