The UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has cracked down on BuzzFeed for a piece of native advertising that that breached its Recognition of Marketing Communications code.

The piece in question, a list of 14 Laundry Fails We’ve All Experienced that ran on the site last October, was promoting the Dylon Colour Catcher product, but the ASA received a complaint that it failed to be obviously identifiable as native advertising.

The page featured Dylons name and logo, as well as a brand message, along with coloured labels on the sites homepage and search results flagging it up as promoted by Dylon and advertiser respectively. BuzzFeed has argued that, in the absence of any UK ruling on labelling native ads, these measures are in line with the US AAAA standards on differentiating native ads from editorial content.

However, the ASA has ruled that the ad breached rules 2.1 and 2.4 of the CAP Code (Edition 12), because the brand name and logo were not sufficiently prominent and did not adequately convey the commercial nature of the content to consumers. It acknowledged that BuzzFeeds labelling would be enough for users who came to the content from the sites own search results or homepage, but noted that this was not the only route to reaching the page – presumably in reference to search engine and social links. Finally, the ASA said, the brand message only implied a connection with Dylon rather explicitly marking the piece out as paid content, and also appeared at the bottom of a long page, where users would not see it until they had already engaged with the content.

Neither BuzzFeed nor the advertiser face any further penalty, but the ad has been banned from appearing in its current form. The webpage still appears in Google results but has been taken down by the publisher.