What is Marketing Compliance?
Marketing compliance ensures that all marketing content adheres to not only brand standards such as logos, fonts and tone of voice, but also laws and industry regulations as well whose aim is to protect consumers from misleading information and frankly, false advertising. In addition, marketing compliance also encompasses legislation such as data privacy and how promotions are managed.
While there are many aspects to marketing compliance best practices, key areas include:
- Marketing Legal Compliance
Ensures that all marketing content and activities are ethical and comply with local laws. Marketing materials must be truthful, accurate and cannot mislead consumers. The higher the pricepoint, or the more critical the product where stakes are high for non compliance (i.e. healthcare, financial services and gambling) the bigger the potential fines. - Data Privacy
Compliance with data privacy laws, such as ACMA, CCPA, GDPR and related regulations, is crucial for protecting consumer data. Fines can be in the hundreds of thousands, and even in the millions for breaches, and include not just data protection, but inappropriate email marketing and text messaging. - Advertising Claims
Marketing materials must be backed by evidence, avoiding misleading or deceptive claims and in some industries, whenever a price point or a promotion is mentioned, a disclaimer must also be shown. - Promotion Compliance
Special rules apply to promotions like cashbacks, prizes, gift cards, and discounts, and typically, end dates on all promotions are required. - Marketing Regulatory Compliance
Adhering to industry regulations set by organizations like the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission), APRA or ACM in Australia, or the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) or FINRA in the US, or ESMA in the UK is essential for firms. Many of these regulations have broad rules open to interpretation so it’s critical for firms to have specific standards that are uniformly applied based on risk appetite. - Brand Consistency
Ensuring that all marketing materials align with approved brand guidelines, including tone of voice, product spelling, logo usage, fonts, and messaging, is also part of marketing compliance, although this is an internal aspect that is not required by an external governing body.
What are the Risks of Non-Compliance?
CMO’s and heads of legal and compliance at major brands know all too well the costs of not following marketing compliance best practices. For example, in Australia, the country’s leading telecommunications company was fined $625,000 after it was sent over 10 million text messages that did not comply with local spam laws where unsubscribes were in breach with the law.
In April 2025, FINRA issued a $250,000 fine to a member firm for failure to preserve over 1.25 million electronic communications, the “vast majority of which” were marketing emails, which is against FINRA regulations.
But these fines look small when compared to global greenwashing fines issued to both asset managers and also car companies, for overstating environmental claims. Greenwashing fines in Australia, Europe and the US have been in the tens of millions of dollars.
How Can CMOs and Legal Teams Manage Marketing Compliance?
The good news is that with the growing amount of content, social media, sales presentations and collateral, firms like IntelligenceBank specialize in the end to end management of content so it stays brand and legal compliant throughout its lifecycle. Importantly, here are some of the software features that assist companies in regulated industries such as financial services, asset management, healthcare, gaming, utilities and pharmaceuticals ensure they can produce content quickly while also adhering to brand, legal and regulatory frameworks. Here are some of the key marketing compliance capabilities:
Digital Asset Management Software – is critical to have a single source of truth for approved assets to ‘live’ in one place, with version control, an audit trail and the ability for your team to search for and use assets and messaging that are brand and legally approved.
Creative Workflow Approvals – on Briefs and Creative Assets – to show both internal audit as well as external regulators the audit trail of who approved what and when. By having a creative workflow system, marketing and legal teams can save countless hours when needing to retrieve proof of audit trails taking them minutes instead of weeks or months.
AI Powered Content Reviews – IntelligenceBank’s automated marketing risk detection is a rules-based capability that leverages AI when checking content when you are proofing and approving content. Based on a company’s specific disclaimers, PDS statements, marketing checklists, industry regulations and brand rules, (which account for approximately 80% of all legal and compliance marketing markups); the AI rules show you in a consistent manner where the problems are in the creative, and importantly how to fix it. More and more we are also seeing clients use this for checking content for negative tones, brand tone of voice, and checking for greenwashing.
Creative Templates – automate the production of creative so it’s not only on brand but uses only the correct disclaimers and approved creative assets that are appropriate for the product that is being advertised. This means not only do brands save on production and agency costs, but it also enables teams to quickly produce thousands of assets in a minimal amount of time that legal don’t need to review, as the headlines, images and disclaimers are already pre-approved. Here is how Tabcorp leverages this capability in time for big races.
Disclaimer Engine – can be a stand alone capability your team can use to check which disclaimers should be used by product, state, and media type, or can be fully integrated within your online creative briefs. However your team uses this capability, the main thing is they are using the right disclaimers before they start the creative, which ultimately saves your legal team alot of time, and of course they can be double checked at the proofing stage with the AI rules.
Advanced Reporting – having advanced ‘business intelligence’ quality reporting and interactive dashboards at your fingertips to report in detail on which campaign briefs and creative assets were approved by whom, and when are essential for internal audits and reporting. Reporting also helps you identify bottlenecks such as where approvals are getting stuck and how to optimize processes.
Marketing compliance is not just a regulatory or legal requirement; rather, it is a cornerstone of building trust, protecting brand integrity, and avoiding costly fines. In a complex and scrutinized marketing environment, where content is only increasing daily; adherence to legal, ethical, and brand standards helps organizations avoid costly penalties, reputational damage, and operational setbacks. Importantly, having a marketing compliance best practices system in place empowers teams to operate with the confidence knowing their campaigns are aligned with both internal policies and external regulations. By embedding compliance into the core of marketing operations, where marketers are doing their work (and not having to go into another system), businesses can create more consistent, transparent, and accountable marketing practices—fostering stronger customer relationships and a more resilient brand.
