Fitness influencer Grace Beverly broke advertising rules with Tala social media posts

(Instagram via @gracebeverly)

Fitness influencer and business owner Grace Beverly broke British advertising rules with six posts promoting her activewear brand, Tala, a ruling says.

The 27-year-old entrepreneur who is best known for her large Instagram following and launching her viral workout app, Shreddy, shared two reels and four TikToks in October which the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) have told her to remove.

Beverly shared the videos of her promoting a coat from Tala and the company argued her followers would be aware of her relationship with the activewear brand.

But the ASA disagreed and found they breached rules that adverts must be obviously identifiable.

The watchdog said it had received more than 50 complaints about the posts not being clearly labelled as ads.

In the post, she appears wearing the coat with text that reads “give me less than a minute to tell you why this is the best coat the world has ever seen”.

While Beverly’s side said that her followers would know that she and her brand are synonymous, and that the post was shared jointly with Tala’s Instagram account while the TikToks were shared in a playlist Grace had labelled “aggressive marketing”.

However, the ASA said that social media users who saw the post and didn’t follow Beverly would likely be unaware of her connection to the brand.

The ASA said that references to the brand was only made part-way through the video, “so a user was required to engage with the ads before they heard them”.

The watchdog added that the influencer must make sure to comply with its rules of added a #ad to any posts that include advertising.

Formerly known by her online moniker GraceFitUK, Beverly, who is from London, founded her activewear brand and workout app whilst studying at St Peter’s College, Oxford.

She grew her social media accounts as she became more of a lifestyle and fitness influencer with a focus on her workout and studying habits.

In 2020, she was featured on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe Retail and Ecommerce list, and she also hosts a weekly podcast called Working Hard, Hardly Working.

When Beverly launched her puffer coat collection in October, she posted on Instagram as she celebrated making £1m sales in the first hour of sales, with the coat priced at £129 per piece.

She also launched her own productivity journal through her third company, The Productivity Method, which sells diaries designed to help people prioritise their tasks and manage their success.