In the hustle to stand out in the crowd of competitors, brands often miss out on things at the ground level. Where there are many options for consumers in the market, 91% of consumers are inclined towards brands that are authentic to their claims.
To bring authenticity and growth on one track, many regulatory bodies are working actively to ensure that the brands are growing while consumer rights remain protected.
However, amidst this wave of marketing compliance, a majority of companies ignore checking the compliance of their creatives. Only 29% of the brands claim to evaluate their creatives for a compliance check regularly. Meanwhile, the media agencies and in-house teams still manually process their ad creatives.
Due to the endless requirements of brand creative assets, it becomes challenging for the in-house creative teams to stay aligned with the industry and brand compliances for creatives. Manual verification of creatives leads to issues like posting irregular, flawed, and irrelevant creatives across platforms. Furthermore, this may impact the overall brand’s positioning among consumers.
The Buzz Is
According to the latest report released by the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI), the biggest violator of the advertising code is the education sector followed by healthcare, gaming, personal care, and food & beverages.
Further, the advertisement regulatory body also shared that the complaint against ads increased by up to 14% between April and September of this year. In this one year, they have processed 3,340 complaints against 2764 advertisements that were found as potential violators of the ASCI code.
In addition to this, the regulatory body added that out of the total complaints received 28% of the violations were committed by the influencers. And about 87% of the advertisements having influencers were to be a violation of the influencer guidelines.
Impact Of a Non-Compliant Creative
1. Reputational Damage
It takes years for a brand to build a reputation in the eyes of consumers. And a simple thing like a misleading ad creative can ruin this within a few seconds. When a brand makes false claims about its product or service, the consumer believes them.
And when they don’t get the claimed benefit, they feel cheated and take action against the brand further ruining its reputation.
2. Legal Issues
The repercussions of a false claim or misleading ad creative are not limited to just reputational damage. When the consumer’s trust is damaged and they feel cheated, the angry consumers can boycott the brand, spread negative reviews, or worst they can sue the brand for the damages. This will further put the brand in the negative spotlight resulting in hefty litigation costs.
3. Losing Customer’s Trust
When brands make false claims or post misleading ads, consumers often perceive them to be deceitful. The negative news related to the brand not just impacts the existing consumers but also the new consumers. This impacts the overall reputation of the brand and ruins the prospects of the business.
4. Loses Revenue
The brand has to bear a high cost for a misleading ad. Apart from reputational damage and loss of consumer trust, the brand also has to bear the wastage of ad revenue. Due to the misleading creatives, they are not able to attract the right audience and end up wasting the ad revenue with no return.
How can brands avoid these situations?
The ASCI has made certain regulations that ensure the brand’s ad creatives are marketing compliant. This means that the creatives must comply with the regulatory requirements set up to protect the marketers and their consumers.
However, it is very difficult for the brands to do a manual check for every creative. Hence, they need an advanced solution to ensure the ad creatives are compliant with the ASCI and brand guidelines.
mFilterIt’s creative compliance intelligence tool is focused to bring standardization to the ad creatives of the brand across platforms. With the help of AI and ML capabilities, the tool will ensure that all the ad creatives comply with the guidelines set up by the brand and ASCI.
In addition to this, the tool can also be used to audit the social media and website of the brand to bring a governance system across the owned and advertising brand assets.
The Need Of The Hour
Creative compliance is not a choice but a necessity for a brand to ensure that they are represented similarly across all platforms. Along with protecting the brand from trademark and copyright issues, the brands must also keep an active check on their brand assets going on different platforms. It’s time for brands to wake up and indulge in a more consumer-safe and transparent way of advertising.
