Influencer/brand relationships: what everyone needs to know. With Jennifer Santos and Meredith Petillo

This week's episode is all about influencer marketing, and what everyone needs to know. There are rules, and very real potential repercussions, for brands AND influencers for not getting them right. This podcast features a roundtable discussion with Jennifer Santos from BBB National Programs, now program director of the Center for Industry Self-Regulation (CISR), and Meredith Petillo, VP of technical regulatory affairs at Independent Beauty Association. If you are someone who navigates the interwebs, especially if you’re a content creator or a brand who content creators, this episode should be mandatory listening!

Interested in supporting the podcast? Please share, subscribe and write a review if you haven't already! If it's accessible, you can also support my work on Patreon at www.patreon.com/theecowell. Big thank you to all of my patreon supporters for supporting my scicomm!

This conversation topic was requested by one of my patreon supporters, and it came at the perfect time with CISR just dropping the Institute for Responsible Influence (IRI) training and certification, to train up influencers and get everyone on the same page for the rules and responsibilities. Since disclosure is such a big topic for this discussion, here are the disclosures relevant to this podcast episode. I’ve been a contractor with IBA for the past few years helping them with their scicomm on social media - there was no payment for this episode, I’m genuinely really excited to see this program launch, and really proud of IBA for its contribution. IBA serves on the advisory council for CISR, and both Meredith and I got free early access to the IRI influencer training and certification. If you are a content creator, I could not recommend the training enough. it was super informative, only took 90 minutes, I think it’s pretty accessible - it’s about $100 and comes with ongoing support, and covered all the important things legally that you really need to know, and some of it isn’t that obvious. For example, the extra rules that apply specifically to “expert” influencers. Check out the IRI certification here: responsibleinfluence.org