Influencer marketing keeps eating a bigger slice of ad budgets every year, and the rules around it haven’t exactly kept pace. The European Association of Communications Agencies (EACA) just did something about that gap: it launched a three-part programme aimed squarely at raising influencer marketing standards across the continent, and it’s backed by some genuinely heavyweight names in the industry.
Why Influencer Marketing Standards Needed a Rethink
Money moves fast, regulation moves slow — and creator marketing has been living in that mismatch for years. EACA’s programme is built to close it on three fronts: get agencies and brands aligned on best practice, spread the word about regulatory requirements that shift from country to country (sometimes month to month), and push more creators toward proper #ad disclosure training. None of this is glamorous work. It’s the unglamorous plumbing that keeps an industry from embarrassing itself, which is exactly why it matters.
A New Council, Chaired by Someone Who’s Actually Done the Job
At the center of all this sits a brand-new Influencer Marketing Council, tasked with building common standards and flagging the problems that cut across the whole channel rather than just one market. Thomas Angerer — co-founder and chief creative officer of BeInfluence Europe — will chair it. He won’t be doing it alone. The committee also pulls in John Harding Easson (global influence growth and client lead at Influential, part of Publicis), Ainoa Brenes (global head of influencer marketing at Samy), Emma Odendaal (EMEA head of influence at Dentsu), Miguel Vara (head of content studios at McCann), Iulia Boncan (global social media manager at MCI Group), and Steffen Pferr (business director for social media and digital at Innocean). That’s a genuinely pan-European bench, pulled from agencies that all compete with each other most days of the year.
Angerer put it plainly: creator marketing grew up faster than the frameworks meant to support it, and the Council exists to close that gap. What seems to excite him more than the regulatory cleanup, though, is the research angle — for the first time, practitioners from across Europe’s top agencies get to compare notes on a truly continent-wide basis instead of guessing at what’s happening two borders over. The Council’s stated ambition is bold, maybe a little grand: make Europe the reference point for how creator marketing gets done, globally. Big talk, but not an unreasonable goal given who’s in the room.
Beyond the standard-setting, the group plans to run its own research and industry surveys, then publish recommendations that brands, agencies, and creators can actually use — not just another report that sits unread in a shared drive.
A Practitioner’s Guide That Actually Tries to Be Useful
Alongside the Council, EACA has published something more immediately practical: a guide called “Influencer Marketing Rules Across Europe – A Practitioner’s Guide for EACA Members.” It pulls EU legislation, country-specific rules, and general best practice into one resource, so nobody has to chase down 27 different national regulators to figure out what’s allowed.
Charley Stoney, EACA’s CEO, framed the stakes well: when a channel gets bigger, it has to shoulder more responsibility. Influencer marketing is now trusted with real budgets, which means agencies and advertisers leaning into it need to deliver more than good campaign results — they need the right behaviour and honest public disclosure of brand partnerships to go with it.
Getting Creators Trained on the #ad Rules
The third piece of the programme is arguably the most overdue: a push to get more creators formally trained on advertising disclosure rules. EACA’s position is straightforward — agencies and advertisers should be requiring some form of training from every creator they work with, not just hoping people figure it out on their own.
The numbers explain the urgency. Data from the European Advertising Standards Alliance (EASA), which represents 28 advertising standards bodies across the region, shows that influencer marketing content accounts for 22% of all complaints made against online ads. At least half of those complaints come down to disclosure problems or straight-up legality issues. That’s not a small crack to paper over — it’s a fifth of all online ad complaints tied to one channel, and disclosure failures driving most of it.
The Bottom Line
EACA isn’t pretending this fixes everything overnight. But a chaired council with real agency leadership, a practical reference guide, and a genuine push for creator training is a more coherent response than the patchwork approach the industry has had until now. Whether it moves the needle on that 22% complaint rate is the thing worth watching over the next year.
Sources
- EACA Creates European Council to Enhance Influencer Reputation — LBBOnline
- European Association of Communications Agencies
