The Brand, Influencer's Post and a Question of Disclosure

Foi Wambui’s involvement in a copyright dispute over an OPPO advertisement raises a question every company investing in influencer marketing should consider: who is managing the reputation attached to the content everyone is being paid to produce?

The advertisement had a clever premise. A couple creates memories together, the relationship ends and the woman uses her phone to remove her former partner from their photographs. The product demonstration sits comfortably inside a story audiences can recognise, with music helping the scene carry its emotion. For a smartphone brand trying to demonstrate an image editing feature through an influencer’s content, the creative logic is easy to understand.

According to Daily Nation Wambui received KSh600,000 for the campaign, which used musician Mutoriah’s song Beta. The musician subsequently challenged the use of his work, alleging that permission had not been obtained. What began as a commercial story about a phone became a dispute about the creative work used to sell it.

Kenyan court rejected Wambui’s application to be removed from the proceedings, allowing the matter to move towards a full hearing. That ruling did not establish liability for copyright infringement. The claims and the responsibilities of the parties remain for determination through the case.

For communications professionals, however, the significance extends beyond the eventual legal outcome. The case invites scrutiny of what brands believe they are buying when they commission influencer campaigns. They are paying for creativity, audience access and an association with someone whose public presence can make a product more interesting. They should also expect the people managing that investment to understand what could turn the association into a problem.

A campaign brief can describe the intended audience in considerable detail while saying remarkably little about the responsibility attached to reaching it. The team knows which creator can attract attention, what the content should communicate and when it must appear. The more difficult questions concern everything supporting that execution: where the material comes from, what the brand is entitled to do with it, what the creator understands about the assignment and who has the authority to stop publication when something is unresolved.

This is where the distinction between booking an influencer and managing an influencer relationship becomes commercially important. Booking produces an agreement, a schedule and a deliverable. Management requires someone to understand how the creator, the agency, the brand and the work itself fit together. A company can have an excellent influencer and an appealing piece of content while still having an incomplete process behind the campaign.

The OPPO dispute is particularly instructive because reporting describes competing positions over responsibility and the involvement of an agency appointed to execute the campaign. These are contested accounts, not grounds for deciding publicly who should carry the blame. They nevertheless illustrate the kind of question a brand should want settled in its own arrangements before a campaign begins: when several parties contribute to the work, who maintains a complete view of what is being published?

From a reputation perspective, the public is unlikely to study the appointment structure before forming an impression. The advertisement promotes a recognisable product and appears through a recognisable creator. If it becomes controversial, both associations remain visible. An agency agreement may be important in determining contractual responsibilities, but it cannot make the brand disappear from the public conversation. Leadership therefore needs to understand the difference between assigning work and maintaining sufficient oversight of the reputation that work carries.

There is a corresponding responsibility towards the influencer. Brands examine creators to establish whether their behaviour, public statements and previous associations could expose the company to embarrassment. That scrutiny is understandable. Yet the relationship also exposes the creator to decisions made by the commissioning organisation and its representatives. A creator may put years of audience trust behind a campaign whose production arrangements they did not design. Responsible influencer management should consider how the assignment protects that relationship as well as how it protects the client.

That requires more than adding restrictive clauses to a contract. If a creator is expected to obtain permissions for supplied material, the brief, budget and production timetable should reflect that responsibility. If the agency supplies the assets, the creator should understand their permitted use. If the brand changes the execution or extends its distribution, someone should review what that change means for the original arrangements. These are practical decisions through which the parties demonstrate that they understand the work they have commissioned.

The approval process deserves particular attention because approval can mean different things to different people. A marketing executive may be satisfied that the product appears correctly. An agency may be satisfied that the video meets the brief. The creator may reasonably be waiting for confirmation that the content can go live. Unless the process connects those decisions, a series of approvals can create confidence without establishing whether all the relevant questions have been answered.

Experienced counsel should be capable of identifying that gap without turning every creative assignment into an administrative exercise. The intervention may be a question about a soundtrack, an unsupported product claim, an image supplied by someone outside the project or a proposed use that extends beyond the original agreement. Its value lies in recognising which detail could become consequential. The person asking may contribute nothing visible to the finished video while providing some of the most valuable advice in the campaign.

This is also why communications teams should be careful about treating every request for verification as an obstacle to creativity. Influencer work depends on pace, familiarity and the freedom to speak in a voice audiences already recognise. Those qualities are worth protecting. Clear arrangements allow creators to exercise that freedom with a better understanding of what is available to them, what requires a separate decision and where they can obtain an answer. Uncertainty becomes more disruptive when it is discovered after publication.

The African creative economy adds another dimension to this discussion. Brands seek out local creators because cultural relevance has commercial value. Music, humour, language and recognisable experiences help an advertisement belong within an audience’s everyday life. Those elements are often central to why the content works. The commercial arrangements should recognise the people whose work supplies that value, including contributors who may never appear in the campaign’s headline partnership.

Mutoriah’s allegation must be assessed on its evidence. The broader principle should nevertheless be familiar to any company investing in African creativity: an artist’s work can be commercially important even when the artist is not the person contracted to promote the product. Campaign teams need to understand the full creative contribution they are drawing upon. Cultural familiarity should prompt informed engagement with that work, rather than an assumption that its availability makes its commercial use straightforward.

When a dispute arises, those relationships become part of the response. The brand needs an accurate account of what happened, the creator needs clarity about their position and the complainant needs their concern addressed through an appropriate process. Public explanations should follow established facts and coordinated advice. A rush to distance the company from the other participants can create further reputational difficulty, particularly if the organisation previously presented the campaign as evidence of a successful partnership.

At Millionsworth Public Relations, this is why we approach influencer management within the wider responsibilities of strategic communications and reputation management. Audience selection and creative execution matter, but so do the conditions under which someone is being asked to represent a brand. Counsel should help the organisation understand the association it is entering, the claims it is supporting and the decisions that could affect both its own credibility and that of its partners.

The court will determine the disputed responsibilities in the Foi Wambui matter. Brands considering their own influencer programmes do not need to wait for that outcome before examining whether their arrangements are clear enough. The useful question is whether the people managing the campaign can explain how it was put together as confidently as they can explain how many people it reached.

The OPPO advertisement was intended to demonstrate what a phone could remove from a photograph. The dispute has drawn attention to the people and responsibilities behind the finished picture. For any company commissioning its next influencer campaign, that is a reason to look beyond the face on the screen and ask whether the reputation paying for the exposure is receiving the same attention as the content.