What is the SEC marketing rule?

The SEC marketing rule is the regime under which registered investment advisers in the United States advertise. It modernised earlier advertising and solicitation rules into a single framework administered by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The rule addresses several areas that matter to a marketing team, including the use of testimonials and endorsements, the presentation of performance results, and a general requirement that an advertisement be fair and balanced and not misleading. Each of these areas has its own conditions, which is why an adviser's marketing material usually passes through review by people who understand both the message and the rule before it is used.

Because the rule reaches into how results and reviews are shown, an adviser's marketing material needs a careful, documented review before it is used, and the firm needs to keep a record of that review. A short social post and a detailed performance summary may sit at very different ends of that spectrum, but both need to be able to demonstrate that the firm's process was followed.

Cohiva Campaign helps an adviser's marketing team run that review as an enforced control. The go-live is rejected at the API until the team's checklist passes, multi-stage approvals keep the review independent, and an append-only audit records every decision. It helps you comply and keeps the record; it does not guarantee regulatory compliance, and it does not provide legal advice.

How the rule applies to a particular advertisement, and how it sits alongside an adviser's books-and-records obligations, is a matter for the firm's compliance officer and counsel. The job of a marketing-operations platform is narrower and concrete: make sure the documented review actually runs before anything is published, keep the person who created a piece separate from the person who approved it, and preserve a complete, dated record that the review took place, so the firm can answer questions about it later.

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