Copyright Compliance in Marketing: Avoid Costly Mistakes with Centralized Control

When there are hundreds, if not thousands of individuals involved through the chain when distributing marketing content across numerous outlets, it isn’t surprising that occasionally someone will use copyrighted material beyond its lease or forget to provide disclaimers. This can have huge implications. Thankfully, centralized content distribution can help to mitigate this challenge.

The centralization of content distribution offers many benefits; from reducing production costs, speeding up delivery, limiting local versioning, and stemming divergence from campaign themes. But how can this centralization protect your brand from getting into hot water with the regulators?

If your brand uses stock imagery or video in campaign marketing assets, you’ll understand the importance of ensuring you don’t step outside the usage rights agreement. When you’re sending campaign assets to multiple regional offices across the globe, it’s all too easy for someone to make a mistake that falls foul of the rules – and the bigger the roll out the larger the fine!

Rights-restricted designs, images, or videos are likely to have time limits on their use, after-which the use of materials may incur serious penalties if not contained quickly. One way to manage purchased images is through a central distribution system that allows you to set a time limit on the use of the restricted material. Once this time has passed, any content featuring the restricted image will automatically be removed from the distribution platform, preventing illegal use and avoiding a fine which will come straight off the campaign’s ROI.

Distributing to local markets will often need some added input; language and products, and even messaging, may need to be nuanced. HQ can deliver content templates containing restricted material to each locale, so limits on use embedded into the templates will prevent content from being used outside of the terms, saving you from big fines. If there are too many locales to consider, give the power to your regional offices and place an extra layer of protection through warnings (i.e. showing a pop up checking that the manager has the right to use this content or forcing uploaded content to be approved through HQ).

Legal disclaimers are essential to almost all campaigns. When running competitions, giveaways, or any other type of promotion, there will always be disclaimers attached. If these promos are rolled out across multiple stores and regions, it is easy for some parts of the chain to make errors – misworded or misspelled disclaimers can be a litigation nightmare. Managing them centrally and rolling them out across all regions will help prevent this becoming an issue – greater control means mistakes can be contained.

For any brand marketing team, the secondary concern from all of this is the potential for massive hikes in the cost of production. If one of the regions uses an unleased image or miscopied the disclaimer for a promotion, the brand has to fork-out for the fines. If the mistake is large enough or discovered too late, the campaign materials may have to be recalled, reproduced and redistributed, costing yet more money, more time, and seriously impacting your ROI.

If you would like some more advice on how central content distribution could help your brand, contact the Brandgility team for a demo, or see how we’re helping our current clients.