Marketing and advertising compliance isn’t just about following rules. It’s a responsibility shared by companies across the globe — a way to protect consumers from unclear, misleading, or even predatory activities and help ensure they know exactly what they’re buying. This, in turn, protects businesses like yours and promotes consistency in a competitive marketplace.
Of course, keeping compliant with a myriad of marketing and advertising regulations and maintaining these requirements across departments comes with challenges. Required disclosures, long lists of risky words, repetitive errors and seemingly endless rounds of revisions between marketing, legal and compliance teams are just a few factors that can reduce the efficiency of the review process and those involved, accordingly.
The implementation of marketing compliance solutions enable organizations to counteract these challenges and better protect against content based risk. Some of these solutions position themselves as ready to use, “off the shelf” offering a general baseline of rules developed against relevant regulations, while others are tailored to the unique guidelines of the business, enabling more comprehensive risk detection and hyper-relevance to risk appetite and resourcing objectives.
The reality is that cookie-cutter solutions force you to play by generic rules. That’s an issue if those rules can’t be customized to you – after all, regulatory advice is principal-based, not prescriptive — which means each company should interpret marketing and advertising law based on custom legal advice in relation to the needs of their own business.
Off-the-shelf solutions tend to ignore nuance. In many ways, they identify anything that could be risky to anyone, meaning that many businesses have to dig through false positives. For example, Insurance, energy, pharma, or food and beverage companies will not benefit from a financial institution’s risk model.
Companies using Machine Learning (ML) or Large Language Models (LLM) with learnings from your competitor’s risk tolerance will not understand your organization’s nuance. While these models have impressive natural language capabilities, their “logic” remains undefined. This undefinable logic makes LLMs problematic when used in sensitive, legal, real-world scenarios.
The takeaway is simple: Custom tools are built for you, with your logic, aligned to your specific challenges and needs.
Understanding which of these solutions are most suited to your business, requires analysis and clarity on what, precisely, you are trying to achieve. Here, we outline why we believe custom solutions are crucial to the suitability of your marketing compliance programs, particularly in industries such as financial services and insurance.
Compliance must-haves: Consider your needs
When it comes to researching and implementing a new solution, many companies look to off-the-shelf solutions believing this will provide fast, effective answers to their marketing compliance challenges internally. Using predetermined, templated rules to identify risks in marketing content; this type of solution provides an almost “plug and play” approach to addressing standard regulatory obligations. However, having a baseline list of regulatory risks is only the first step. You’ll need to consider how these apply to your organization’s risk appetite, each of the individual regulatory requirements and responses and how to best address them.
By taking the time up front to analyze your existing process end to end, this can reveal additional points of friction and often identifies that it is not simply a matter of implementing blanket industry regulations to enhance compliance, but that other areas of the process may benefit from technology also. Thus, the relevance of narrow, predetermined requirements provided by off the shelf solutions is called into question.
Start with a thorough analysis of your regulatory compliance landscape and all the associated tasks, challenges, and requirements, as well as internal processes (at what point are the relevant departments engaged and how?). Be sure to consider:
Recording Regulatory Guidelines
Compliance and legal guidelines are often being adapted and updated, and can differ by industry, region, product or service, by marketing material type and by channel. If you have a complex range of products that are highly regulated, there’s likely a need for a more comprehensive and dynamic set of centralized guidelines. These typically require the ability to be updated easily and to be accessible across relevant departments.
What to ask:
- When was the last time we updated our compliance guidelines / review checklist?
- How many distinct products do we have, and how many adjacent guidelines do we need?
Cross-departmental collaboration
An efficient advertising and marketing compliance approach demands teamwork. However, departments often have differing objectives, and such is the case when it comes to marketing and legal/compliance working cross-functionally. Despite differing priorities, working together requires a cohesive and transparent process, which technology is well placed to assist with.
What to ask:
- Do all team(s) have access to required guidelines and disclosures? Are they easy to use?
- What aspects of the process need to be communicated between teams?
- Who (in the business) needs to be able to use the solution?
Automation opportunities
Automation represents a valuable method to improve risk detection accuracy and efficiency,saving time across the process. Typically we see two points in the review workflow where businesses leverage automation, these are:
- Pre-production: assessing unpublished assets
- Post-publication: assessing live website content
What to ask:
- In terms of technology, what are the limitations of our current process at each of these stages?
- Are SLAs being met or exceeded?
- What is the average content review time for each stage?
Compliance risk profiles
You may have a company-wide risk profile that considers your industry and key strategies. However, you might have additional risk profiles based on product type or region. This may mean it isn’t feasible to default to a list of prescribed risks as they can’t be scaled across segments.
What to ask:
- Do you have risks that need to be prioritized by product/region?
- Do you record all touch-points during review of an asset in case of an audit?
Based on your review of the current marketing compliance setup, the next step is deciding how to address any challenges or gaps and whether a plug and play style tool or custom solution is better placed to provide a more relevant approach. To do that, you can use these questions:
“What challenges do we want to address?”
It’s important to know what your goals are when choosing a compliance solution. For example, maybe you want to look for or consider:
- Accuracy
- Scalability
- Flexibility
- Support
- Implementation speed
- System interoperability
- User-friendliness
This is also a good time to identify current limitations and areas for improvement across all your compliance monitoring and marketing activities.
“Do we anticipate any areas to be particularly complex?”
When you’ve drawn out your key compliance processes and highlighted key needs, it’s much easier to identify potential challenges. While a custom solution makes room for fixes, off-the-shelf tools tackle the issues anticipated for a ‘standard’ company. If your challenges fall outside that limited framework, you’ll have to find — and likely pay for — separate solutions, or enhance the one you have.
“What will our day-to-day processes look like with this solution?”
Think about how marketing compliance technology may fit into your current approach and where it can offer improvements. In order to implement a solution that will provide a truly scalable process it is important to understand by whom and how it will be used at each stage, ensuring it meets the needs of all those stakeholders.
Reviewing compliance options and applying them to your business in practice will help you identify the best fit. Each business is unique, and your answers to these questions will be distinct to you.
Common challenges with “off-the-shelf” marketing compliance solutions
Off-the-shelf marketing compliance solutions often lack in a number of areas:
- Flexibility: Even if you are looking for a solution to identify industry standard regulations, to ensure increased relevancy you’ll need flexibility to customize risk identifiers and feedback that factors in your internal requirements, so having a “plug and play” solution may not be able to address risks in content as comprehensively as required.
- Control: With off-the-shelf solutions, you may not have control over the specifics — that means your company could be paying for another business’s oversights.
- Relevance: Typically, features included in off-the-shelf solutions are based on generic or industry and business standards, which means some aspects may not be relevant.
- Scalability: As a business operating in a regulated industry, you know that when it comes to enterprise technology, one size does not fit all. Without the ability to customize the solution to your needs, this means that if your business is expanding marketing into other regions, regulations are updated, the products or services you offer are changed, or even if your risk appetite becomes more stringent, then this may mean that adding or changing regulatory guidelines that the solution uses is cumbersome, expensive, complex or sometimes – simply not possible.
At Red Marker, we know that just one of these issues could significantly impact your ability to effectively scale marketing regulatory compliance, which is why we do not offer Red Marker “off the shelf”.
Here are five ways customized marketing compliance software can make all the difference:
#1: Tailored risk detection
Having the fundamentals of a solution tailored to the risk appetite and internal guidelines of the business can help you achieve efficiency, accuracy, and effectiveness relevant to your organization’s objectives.
#2: Enhanced collaboration
Cross-functional communication can be challenging. Fortunately, when you implement a solution that is customized for use across all departments involved in a process, it enables the business to benefit from more streamlined workflows, increased transparency, and improved communication.
#3: Consistent compliance
Compliance across all advertising and marketing channels doesn’t just build trust — it solidifies your brand and reputation. Custom software helps maintain accuracy and consistency at every touch-point, from draft social media campaigns to printed materials.
#4: Scalability
A custom compliance solution is built for your organizational needs today and tomorrow. That means you’ll have the foundation you need for quick wins and long-term improvements alike. Even as content volumes and channels increase and you end up with more assets to address in the same time frame, you’ll be prepared. That’s because custom solutions are built with the understanding of your business objectives and how they change over time.
#5: Improved outcomes
With the right solution, you can create a higher level of compliant content through scalable processes and improved interdepartmental relationships. You’ll also have faster, more accurate reviews and less wasted time across the board, which means your campaigns could always go out on time.
At Red Marker, we’re putting all of this and more right at your fingertips. Our customized compliance solution helps your business:
- Align with all industry specific requirements, plus your internal rules, in the way you want
- Build a repeatable, efficient process for the future
- Simplify and streamline content review processes
- Save time and money
- Improve collaboration between legal/compliance and marketing teams
With Red Marker, no matter what your compliance needs look like, we are ready to help you address them your way.
Ready to get started? Contact us today to see what our custom marketing compliance software can do for you.