Most disclosure mistakes in New Zealand are not made by people trying to hide anything. They are made by teams who copied a convention from somewhere else, or who assumed a hashtag was enough because everybody else uses one.
The rule itself is short. It is the application that catches people.
The rule
Rule 2(a) of the Advertising Standards Authority's Advertising Standards Code requires an advertisement to be identified as such. If a brand paid for a post, gave the product, or provided any other consideration for it, that post is an advertisement and the audience has to be able to tell.
For creator and customer content, the defensible label is Ad, Advert or Advertisement, with or without a hash.
Where it has to appear
At first interaction. That phrase is doing all the work, and it means the first thing the audience encounters, not the first thing they encounter if they keep going.
- A caption: at the start, before the see-more cut, not at the end of a hashtag block.
- A video: in the first frame, and in the title or on-screen where the platform allows it.
- A story: on the first frame, legible at the size it is actually viewed.
- A thumbnail: if the thumbnail is what people see first, that is where it belongs.
A label the audience has to work for is not a label.
The five that do not count
These appear constantly in New Zealand feeds and none of them satisfies the rule on its own.
- #gifted. Describes the relationship. The post still needs an advertising label.
- #collab. Same problem, and vaguer.
- #sp and #partner. Abbreviations that assume the audience knows a convention.
- #sponsored. The ASA has specifically said influencers should not use sponsored as their sole label, because the platforms use that word for boosted posts. It now signals paid distribution rather than a commercial relationship, which is precisely the confusion the rule exists to prevent.
None of these are banned. They can follow the advertising label. They cannot replace it.
The standard opening we use
Every paid customer post that goes out through us starts one of two ways:
Ad | Gifted product from [brand]
Or a caption that opens with #Ad. The label first, the relationship second. That ordering is not a style preference, it is the rule.
It applies to your own channels too
A brand reposting customer content it paid for is still publishing an advertisement. So is theSalt, when we post work a brand paid for on our own channels. There is no exemption for the party doing the reposting.
Where the code gets stricter
Disclosure is the floor. Three categories add requirements that reach back into who can be recruited at all.
Alcohol. Under the Alcohol Code, creators must be at least 25 and appear at least 25, and audiences must be age-gated to 18 plus or shown to be 80% or more adult. That rules out an open community call, which is why alcohol campaigns have to be designed around the code from the first planning conversation.
Therapeutic and health. Under the code in force from 1 July 2026, a person cannot claim in an advertisement that a product treated, prevented or cured something, and consumer testimonials for prescription medicines are prohibited outright. A sincere first-hand account is still a therapeutic testimonial if it makes that claim. See pharmacy and health.
Food and beverage. A child in New Zealand is anyone under 16. Products that fail the FSANZ nutrient profiling standard are treated as occasional and must not target children, and a creator under 16, or one whose New Zealand audience is 25% or more under 16, counts as targeting them.
The Fair Trading Act sits underneath all of it
Section 12A prohibits unsubstantiated representations: claims made without reasonable grounds at the time they were made, even if they later turn out to be true. A customer saying your product removed something is a representation the brand is answerable for.
In practice that means holding the evidence before the post goes live: the dated original statement, proof of use, the incentive record, the final edit and the substantiation for any claim in it. Every campaign here keeps that file.
Why this is worth getting right rather than just getting past
Disclosure done properly does not cost performance. A post that opens with Ad and then shows something genuinely useful still works, because the audience was never confused about what it was looking at. What damages a brand is being caught having hidden it.
The mechanics of how content gets checked before it is licensed are in what we reject, and why, and the wider model is on the customer-generated content page.