The EU Digital Markets Act and Influencer Marketing: What the Gatekeeper Ad Rules Actually Change

Short answer: two provisions matter, the rest is noise

The EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA) wasn't written with influencer marketing in mind — it's competition law aimed at a small list of named "gatekeepers." But two of its provisions land directly on a campaign the moment it also runs paid ads on Meta, Google or Amazon, not just organic influencer content. Article 5(2) requires a specific consent before the platform may combine data from your own website with its own platform data — that reaches retargeting built on influencer-driven traffic. Article 5(9) and 5(10) give advertisers and publishers a right to daily, free information on price, fees and the metrics those prices are calculated from — but only at the gatekeepers where the advertising service itself has been designated as a core platform service. That covers Meta's and Google's advertising services and Amazon Advertising. It does not cover TikTok Ads, which the European Commission explicitly declined to designate on 13 May 2024.

The DMA is competition law, not marketing law

Worth stating first, because it's the most common misreading of the DMA (Regulation (EU) 2022/1925): it doesn't govern what you're allowed to claim in an ad, and it replaces nothing the Academy already covers on disclosure rules or GDPR. Instead, the DMA regulates how a small list of named "gatekeeper" companies may run their own platforms — when they can combine data across their services, how transparent they have to be to the businesses that use their platform as an ad channel, and when they can favour their own services. Most of the DMA's provisions concern things far removed from an influencer campaign — app store fees, browser choice screens, interoperability between messaging apps. Two provisions, though, land squarely in the everyday practice of anyone who runs both influencer marketing and paid advertising on the same platforms.

The two provisions that actually touch a campaign

Article 5(2): consent to combine your own data with the platform's

Article 5(2) bans a gatekeeper from doing several things without a specific, active end-user consent — including, per the provision's own wording, (a) processing, for the purpose of providing online advertising, personal data of end users of third-party services that themselves make use of the gatekeeper's core platform services, and (b) combining personal data from the core platform service with personal data from the gatekeeper's other services or from third-party services. Translated into an influencer campaign: if a customer clicks through from a creator's Instagram Story via your tracking link, lands on your own store, and the Meta Pixel on your site logs the visit — that's exactly the situation Article 5(2) regulates. Meta isn't allowed to freely combine that data from your site with what it already knows about the user from Instagram and Facebook to build a sharper retargeting or lookalike audience. It requires that the user has actively been given the specific choice and said yes.

This isn't theoretical. It's precisely the mechanic behind Meta's contested "pay or consent" model, introduced in November 2023 for EU users of Facebook and Instagram: either a paid, ad-free subscription, or free access in exchange for personalised ads. The European Commission concluded the model doesn't meet Article 5(2)'s requirements, because the binary choice effectively forces users to consent to data combination with no genuine, less-personalised alternative — and in April 2025 fined Meta €200 million under the DMA, the first fine of its kind. Meta has since, per the Commission's own 8 December 2025 announcement, committed to giving EU users a clearer choice on personalised ads to address it.

Article 5(9) and 5(10): daily pricing transparency — but only where the ad service itself is designated

Article 5(9) requires a gatekeeper to provide each advertiser, daily and free of charge, with information on each advertisement it placed: the price and fees, the remuneration a publisher received (subject to the publisher's consent), and the metrics those prices and fees are calculated from. Article 5(10) gives publishers the mirror-image right. Both provisions also require the gatekeeper to give advertisers and publishers access to performance-measuring tools so they can independently verify the figures themselves.

The nuance most overview articles skip: the duty only applies where the gatekeeper's advertising service itself is designated as a core platform service — not merely because the social platform the content runs on is designated. Meta Ads, Alphabet's own online advertising service, and Amazon Advertising are all separately designated core platform services. TikTok, by contrast, was only designated for the "online social networking service" on 5 September 2023 — the Commission made an explicit decision on 13 May 2024 not to designate ByteDance for TikTok Ads. That means a brand boosting a creator's content through Meta Ads Manager, or running Amazon Advertising on top of a Creator Connections activation, is entitled to the daily pricing transparency. A brand running Spark Ads on TikTok isn't — it's left with TikTok's ordinary, contract-based terms instead.

Who's a gatekeeper right now, and where each duty actually lands

Company	Designated core platform services (ad-relevant)	Article 5(2) (consent to combine data)	Article 5(9)/(10) (daily pricing transparency)
Meta	Facebook, Instagram, Meta Ads	Yes	Yes — Meta Ads is itself designated
Alphabet (Google)	YouTube, Google Search, Alphabet's advertising service	Yes	Yes — the advertising service is itself designated
Amazon	Amazon Marketplace, Amazon Advertising	Yes	Yes — Amazon Advertising is itself designated
ByteDance (TikTok)	TikTok (as a social network)	Yes — applies to TikTok itself as a platform	No — TikTok Ads was explicitly not designated (13 May 2024)
Microsoft	LinkedIn	Yes	No separately designated advertising service found in this research

The list of designated gatekeepers and core platform services changes over time — the Commission's own Gatekeepers Portal is the authoritative place to check the current status before relying on the table above for a specific decision.

What this actually changes for an influencer campaign

The decisive line runs between organic and paid distribution of the influencer content:

• Purely organic influencer activity — a creator posts with your tracking link or discount code, and you never pay the platform to distribute that post as an ad — isn't directly reached by Article 5(9) or 5(10). You aren't an advertiser in the DMA's sense, because there's no ad placement to be transparent about.
• Paid amplification of influencer content — a boosted Reel, a Meta Partnership Ad, an Amazon ad tied to a Creator Connections activation — makes you an advertiser on the gatekeeper's own advertising service, which triggers Article 5(9)'s right to daily pricing and metrics data, where that advertising service is itself designated (see the table above).
• Retargeting built on influencer-driven traffic — a lookalike or retargeting audience built from visitors who arrived via a creator's link — is where Article 5(2) comes into play, regardless of whether the influencer activation itself was organic. It's your own pixel data the gatekeeper can't freely combine with its own platform data.

It's also worth noting what Article 5(9) and 5(10) actually fix: historically, an advertiser's insight into exactly what a Meta or Google ad really cost, and which metrics that price was based on, has been limited — ad auctions have functioned, in practice, as something close to a black box. Meta's own DMA compliance report, submitted to the Commission on 6 March 2025, covers Articles 5(2), 5(8), 5(9) and 5(10) among the obligations Meta reports having implemented, per the report's own structure — a concrete sign the provisions are actually operational, not just theory on paper.

How the DMA differs from the other EU rules the Academy already covers

	DMA	GDPR	EU AI Act, Article 50
What it regulates	How a small list of named gatekeepers may run their own platforms	Processing of personal data generally, regardless of company size	Labelling of AI-generated content, see the Academy's own breakdown
Who it's aimed at	Only the designated gatekeepers themselves (Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, ByteDance, etc.)	Every controller and processor	Providers and deployers of AI systems
Relevance to your brand directly	Indirect — you benefit from the rights the DMA gives you as an advertiser/user on the platform	Direct — you're the controller for your own tracking and marketing	Direct, if you use AI-generated content in campaigns yourself

Decision framework

• IF you run only organic influencer content with no paid boost → Article 5(9) and 5(10) aren't relevant to you yet; watch for that to change if you start boosting content.
• IF you run paid Meta or Amazon ads on top of influencer content → you're entitled to the daily pricing transparency under Article 5(9) — ask your account team whether you're actually getting the data you're entitled to.
• IF you build retargeting or lookalike audiences from traffic driven by an influencer campaign → expect Meta and Google to increasingly require a specific, separate consent from the user before that data can be combined with the platform's own — your ordinary cookie-banner setup doesn't solve this on its own.
• IF you run Spark Ads on TikTok → remember TikTok Ads isn't covered by Article 5(9) and 5(10)'s transparency requirements — you're left with TikTok's ordinary, contract-based terms for pricing and metrics visibility.

Common mistakes

• Assuming the DMA is a marketing law. It's competition law aimed at a handful of named gatekeepers — it replaces none of your disclosure or GDPR obligations.
• Assuming that because TikTok is a designated gatekeeper, every DMA duty applies to TikTok Ads too. It doesn't — the advertising service was explicitly not designated in May 2024.
• Conflating Article 5(2)'s consent requirement with your ordinary cookie consent. The two are related but separate — see Consent Mode and influencer tracking in the EU for how the more familiar cookie-consent duty works.
• Assuming organic influencer content is automatically covered. Article 5(9) and 5(10) presuppose that you're actually an advertiser on the gatekeeper's own advertising service — not just that the content appears on the platform.

Make Influence's operational perspective

Make Influence's own tracking model is built on a direct cookie- and click-ID system (see how influencer tracking actually works), not on Meta's, Google's or Amazon's own advertising infrastructure — so Article 5(9) and 5(10) don't reach our core product directly. What we see with our customers is that the question typically surfaces at the other end: when a brand also runs paid boosting or retargeting on top of an influencer activation, and their performance-marketing team runs into new consent flows or changed reporting inside Meta Ads Manager. Our recommendation is to keep the two tracks separate in the brief: the organic influencer activation follows your ordinary tracking setup unchanged, while any paid boost should be assessed separately, with your performance team, in light of the rights and requirements the DMA actually gives you as an advertiser on that specific platform.

FAQ

Does the DMA apply to influencer marketing in general?

No, not directly. The DMA regulates how a small list of named gatekeepers may run their own platforms. It only reaches an influencer campaign to the extent the campaign also involves paid advertising, or data from your own site that needs to be combined with the platform's.

Do we have to do anything ourselves to get the daily pricing transparency under Article 5(9)?

The duty sits with the gatekeeper, not with you — but in practice that means you should ask whether what you're seeing in your ad account actually meets the requirement, rather than assuming it happens automatically.

Is TikTok Ads covered by the DMA's advertising transparency rules?

No. TikTok itself is designated as a gatekeeper for the social network, but the European Commission explicitly decided on 13 May 2024 not to designate ByteDance for TikTok Ads — so Article 5(9) and 5(10)'s daily pricing transparency doesn't apply to TikTok Ads.

Does Article 5(2) mean we can no longer build retargeting audiences from influencer-driven traffic?

Not automatically, but it becomes more conditional: the gatekeeper needs a specific, active consent from the user before that data from your site can be combined with the platform's own data about the same user — a broad, general cookie consent isn't necessarily enough.

What was Meta's €200 million fine actually for?

For the "pay or consent" model Meta introduced in November 2023 — the Commission judged that the binary choice between payment and personalised ads doesn't meet Article 5(2)'s requirement for a genuine, less-personalised alternative. The fine was imposed in April 2025.

Is this the same as the EU AI Act or the Digital Services Act?

No — three separate rulebooks. The DMA governs gatekeeper market conduct, the AI Act's Article 50 governs labelling of AI-generated content (see the Academy's own breakdown), and the Digital Services Act mainly covers content moderation and ad transparency on very large platforms — a separate rulebook this article doesn't cover.

Does this have anything to do with GDPR?

The two overlap in practice but are legally separate: GDPR regulates all processing of personal data, while the DMA's Article 5(2) specifically bans a designated gatekeeper from combining data without consent — a narrower but sharper rule aimed at exactly those companies. See influencer marketing and GDPR for the broader picture.

Does this affect a data clean room like Amazon Marketing Cloud?

Not directly regulated by the two provisions this article covers, but both solve related trust problems in their own way — see data clean rooms for influencer marketing measurement for how Amazon Marketing Cloud and Meta Advanced Analytics work as an alternative to sharing raw data directly.