The account @caroline.career posted a video in which a manager on Zoom hints to a newly pregnant employee that she should resign. It gathered millions of views and thousands of comments. “Discrimination!!!!!!!!” read one comment below it. “Sue them!”
The employee herself replied “Omg I need to look into this!!!”. She will not do so, because the video is a script. As Kate Lindsay describes for Slate ICYMI, @caroline.career belongs to a growing number of accounts that film staged skits as advertising without labelling them.
The product is the Sprout app, which generates CVs and cover letters and applies for jobs by itself. Anyone who signs up via the link in the bio gets a 15% discount, the creator earns a 30% commission, and according to the company's figures the payout can reach as much as $2,000 per video.
Accounts between a brand and an influencer
The format moves between the brand's official account and a declared sponsored post by an influencer with a visible #ad. The video looks like an ordinary story from a workplace, and only in the bio is there an affiliate link, often with no labelling at all.
The same mechanics drive other genres too. The reverse-image-search app Sherlock, which is meant to check potential partners, received 25 million views in a single video. For Spicy Cubes, gummy sweets sold as an aphrodisiac, the product appears only three quarters of the way through a two-minute story about a toxic mother-in-law, with a 25% commission.
The economics are clear to the creator. An anonymous creator whom Lindsay describes signed up to promote a service for AI interview training and receives a base rate of $10 to $100 per video, plus bonuses for milestones such as 500,000 views. “My job isn't really to see or get the memberships,” she says of her videos. “It's more just creating the content and getting it out there.”
Unlabelled advertising has greater reach
The brand's motive rests on reach figures. The official account of Summary AI, an app that transcribes meetings, has around 15,000 followers, and its own videos sit in the low thousands of views. The account @.wfhgirl, which posts endless work skits linking to the same app, regularly reaches tens or hundreds of thousands.
An unlabelled format also gives creators room in the comments, which would look awkward for a brand. The anonymous creator describes how some companies encourage her to stoke disputes in the discussion. “They like it when you're kind of rage baiting the people,” she says, “so then people can go in the comments and argue.”
In an earlier ICYMI episode, Slate mapped the so-called clipping economy, the ecosystem of accounts and bots that manufacture artificial interest in music, series and opinions. The unlabelled skit is its cheaper and more convincing variant.
FTC endorsement rules and staged testimonials
The legal classification is not unclear in the US. “Not a gray area at all,” said Robert Freund, a Los Angeles advertising lawyer who advises brands, agencies and creators. “There's no argument that this is not advertising.”
The Federal Trade Commission has not commented on the practice in general, but it points to its endorsement guides. These rest on the principle that an endorsement must reflect the speaker's real opinion. “An endorsement must reflect the honest opinion of the endorser and can't be used to make a claim the marketer of the product couldn't legally make,” the commission states.
Disclosure alone, however, does not solve the problem. According to Freund, content can be unlawful even with a disclosed connection, if the speaker appears to be a customer when they are not. “You can still have an unlawful piece of content that discloses that there is a connection if the person is appearing to be a customer of the advertiser when they aren't actually a customer,” he says.
Interventions are nonetheless rare. Some videos received only a community note labelling them as hidden advertising. “The more agencies and brands see others doing it, they just assume it's okay,” Freund adds.
Europe has required labelling since 2024
For a European advertiser, exposure is higher than in the US. European rules are more specific and older. The Digital Services Act has applied to all online platforms since 17 February 2024 and, together with consumer protection rules, requires advertising to be clearly labelled.
How large the gap is in practice was shown by a survey by the European Commission and consumer authorities published in February 2024. Of 576 influencers examined, 97% published commercial content, but only 20% labelled it systematically as an advertisement. 38% did not use the platform label and instead used their own wording, most often “collaboration” (16%), “partnership” (15%), or simply a thank-you to the brand (11%).
In Czechia it is an unfair commercial practice
Czech law classifies hidden advertising as an unfair commercial practice. It rests on the Advertising Regulation Act and the Consumer Protection Act, under which advertising that cannot be recognised at first glance must not be used. The Czech Trade Inspection Authority considers only a clear label such as “advertisement”, “sponsored content” or “paid partnership”, placed at the start of the post, to be sufficient. A bare “collaboration with…” is not enough, according to the authority.
That the Czech market faces the same problem as the American one was documented by an analysis by SPIR and the Charles University Faculty of Social Sciences from February 2026. According to it, unlabelled cooperation works better precisely because audiences trust it more than declared advertising. Self-regulation responds with the Fair Influencer Code, which requires a visible label of paid partnership at the very start of the post and also counts non-monetary benefits as remuneration.
The concrete impact on staged skits will depend on interpretation and enforcement, which is slow for foreign accounts targeting Czech audiences. The rule itself, however, is unambiguous and aims at the same thing that Freund points to.
A scene in which a creator pretends to have personal experience with a product remains hidden advertising even if a link in the bio is attached. Under the @caroline.career video, one of the comments eventually named it: “This is just a promo for Sprout.”
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