What is marketing compliance?
Marketing compliance is the work of confirming that a campaign meets its legal, regulatory, and brand requirements before it reaches an audience. The exact requirements depend on the market and the product, and in a regulated sector they can include rules from regulators such as FINRA, the SEC, the FDA, ASIC, the TGA, or AHPRA.
Most teams already keep a checklist of what a campaign must satisfy: legal review, brand-guideline verification, usage-rights confirmation, an accessibility check, and a final approver sign-off. The common weakness is enforcement. When the checklist is advisory, it can be skipped under deadline pressure, and an unchecked campaign goes live.
An enforced compliance gate closes that gap. Cohiva Campaign checks each campaign against the team's own checklist at the API and rejects the go-live with HTTP 422 until every item passes, returning the failed items so the gap is obvious. The control cannot be bypassed from the client or an integration.
Good marketing compliance also leaves a record. On pass, Campaign generates a timestamped compliance certificate and writes every approval and decision to an append-only audit, so a team can show exactly how a campaign cleared review. It helps you comply, but it does not guarantee regulatory compliance, and it is not legal advice.
Marketing compliance is not a single team's job done once. It is an ongoing practice that touches legal, brand, and the marketers producing the work, and it spans every channel a brand publishes to. A practical approach treats the checklist as living, reviewed as regulations and brand guidelines change, and keeps the enforcement and the record in the same place the campaigns are built, so the control travels with the work rather than sitting in a separate document nobody opens.
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Frequently asked questions
- What does marketing compliance cover?
- It covers the legal, regulatory, and brand requirements a campaign must meet before launch, which vary by market and product.
- Which regulators can be involved?
- It depends on the sector and market. Examples include FINRA and the SEC for US financial promotions, the FDA for US prescription drug promotion, and ASIC, the TGA, and AHPRA in Australia.
- What is the difference between advisory and enforced compliance?
- An advisory checklist relies on people remembering it. An enforced gate blocks the go-live at the API until the checklist passes, which removes the most common failure point.
- Does enforcing a checklist mean a campaign is compliant?
- No. It enforces the checklist your team defines and records every decision. It helps you comply, but it does not guarantee regulatory compliance.
Related
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