No marketer wants their brand to make headlines for the wrong reasons. Of course they don’t. Running comms that breach advertising or regulatory rules not only equals bad PR, but hefty fines. Penalties run in the order of millions of dollars and the extent of reputational damage is difficult to summarize. Marketing Compliance software provides the structure and automation that makes it pretty hard to screw things up.
Breaches in marketing compliance can easily happen. Picture a new designer who’s on a tight deadline. They’re stressed trying to connect the dots between the brief and approvals across share drives and emails. In the chaos, they exclude critical fine print or misplace an asterisk. A “sorry dude” from this well-meaning creative just isn’t enough. But the thing is, infringements on standards and governance will happen again – even if you fire the designer and hire another – unless you have the right systems in place.
Marketing compliance; these two words add up to thousands of head hours ensuring your brand’s ads, collateral, packaging and social content adhere to rules set by governing agencies. And it’s not just marketing hours, because don’t forget, you need legal input, C-suite clearance and then your creative agency needs to wrap their minds around it.
If you’re in finance, gambling, healthcare, pharma, automotive, government or any other highly regulated industry, the rubber really hits the road. You’ll be only too familiar with what it takes to ensure marketing compliance. Industries like these need an iron clad workflow system – preferably one that saves time rather than creates more work. This is where Marketing Compliance software, also called Marketing Operations software or Marketing Resource Management (MRM) software comes in. They are all the same thing – but not all are created equal.
What is Marketing Compliance Software?
Marketing Compliance software, when it includes disclaimer engines, robust proofing with tracked changes and auto highlights and robust audit trails, makes marketing compliance easy. It combines marketing asset management and creative workflow processes with high-tech tools to increase efficiencies and accuracy, (aka marketing tech that saves your brand’s reputation and your time).
“IntelligenceBank Marketing Operations Software is the bridge between getting large volumes of great creative out the door and marketing compliance”. – Tessa Court, CEO
IntelligenceBank Marketing Compliance software solves governance issues and saves time.
To achieve both compliance and efficiency, at its very base, marketing compliance software needs to:
- Keep all digital creative assets and marketing documentation in one secure place.
- Have a marketing operations workflow that doubles as a system of record.
- Provide multiple avenues for automation within that system.
IntelligenceBank is unique in that our marketing compliance software manages the entire process from ideation to briefs, to asset approval and distribution.
The list of capabilities in IntelligenceBank’s marketing compliance software listed below is far from exhaustive. But it does provide a top line of the constructive ways our marketing compliance software helps clients produce work at pace and not fall foul of governance.
IntelligenceBank marketing compliance software –
- Consolidates the storage and management of digital creative files.
- Provides dynamic tools that keep the work on brand.
- Has a customizable workflow for end to end delivery; so briefing, proofing, mark ups, version control and approvals.
- Makes that workflow traceable. e.g. who approved and when.
- Includes project management tools, (marketing calendars, Kanban, creative briefs, budgets etc.).
- Auto-populates creative briefs with mandatory content.
- Integrates Dynamic Creative Templates that can lock in essential content.
- Automates repetitive mind numbing functions, (such as sending out the latest logo).
- Generates a dashboard visualizing Content Risk to prioritize approvals and flag expiring content.
- Uses AI to speed up search.
- Offers accessibility and search enhancement features on video assets such as Auto Transcribe.
- Provides data on your assets and campaign ROI.
- Seamlessly connects to your existing third party software (such as Adobe, Microsoft, Getty, Salesforce, WordPress etc.).
- Saves your business FTE hours.
- Frees your team from the minutia so they can focus on the big picture.
- Makes your life easier
The end game when employing Marketing Compliance software is to have all regulatory requirements cemented in and save the business head hours across all functions, (from legals to creative).
A Shout Out to Creative Templates
Our Marketing Compliance software integrates pre-designed, pre-approved templates. Created by your team, templates lock in all necessary compliance requirements yet give the freedom to change other elements in the design. Adjusting an interest rate, a date, price or location can be done safe in the knowledge it ticks every marketing compliance box and does not need to go through 5 rounds of approvals.
This works brilliantly for those cranking out hundreds of pieces of boilerplate or localised collateral. One of our clients produced a phenomenal 9,500 assets with six designers over a ten-week period using this tool. The best part? Not one error.
Creative templates are loved by brands with global creative or franchisees as it allows their colleagues and partners to self-serve. And, with our integrated connectors, changes can all be made within the Marketing Compliance software itself.
IntelligenceBank Creative Templates are pre-approved and pre-loaded with regulatory mandatories.
Features to look for in Marketing Compliance software
Right off the bat, what you don’t want is bolt-on marketing compliance software that weighs you down. Increased compliance sounds onerous, and talking compliance and speed in the same sentence seems counterintuitive. But marketing compliance can actually be the impetus to overhauling your existing martech stack for the better.
Marketing Compliance software – as the name suggests – is100% tailored to marketers. And, the best Marketing Compliance software platforms must have these key capabilities to achieve a reduction in compliance risk and errors:
1. Digital Asset Management
Also known as a DAM or DAM system, this is a repository that categorizes, stores and enables users to share approved creative files. A DAM service ensures only files that have been vetted by your marketing and legal teams and are compliant with talent usage rights are used by your broader team.
2. Online Brand Portal
A space that brings your brand guidelines to life so they are front and centre, a brand portal (which we call BrandHub) enables self-serve and threads automatically into your briefing process.
3. Campaign Management Tools
Built around the marketing workflow system, these marketing compliance tools allow you to manage all facets of a campaign from briefing to proofing, markups, version comparison and control, final approval and dispatch. Marketing compliance is assured with checked pre-set templates and content risk scoring dashboards flag creative assets set to expire.
4. Disclaimer Engine
Critical to marketing compliance, this tool automatically populate briefs with the appropriate ‘fine print’ disclosures and statements, asterisks in the correct position and approved product claims.
Marketing Compliance Fun Fact
Marketing compliance is 570 years old. The concept of marketing compliance can be traced back to the world’s first billboards erected in 15th century Rome. As commerce boomed during the Renaissance, the Empire soon realized that they needed to regulate the increasingly cluttered landscape. And so, in 1452, the world’s first set of marketing compliance regulations were born. The mother of all marketing compliance, known as the ‘Statute of Monopolies’, prohibited false or misleading advertising and required all advertisements to be approved by the government before they could be displayed.
So, while marketing compliance is not a new concept, the automation and AI tools delivered by Marketing Compliance software make them easy to deal with in our fast paced content filled world.
Contact us for a demo to see why over 500 of the world’s leading brands choose IntelligenceBank Marketing Compliance software.
