Law of the Jungle: Turn Marketing Compliance into Your Competitive Advantage

Post the repercussions of the 2007-08 financial crisis, governing bodies all over the world have taken to leaving no stone unturned when it comes to compliance and consumer protection. Regulatory eyes are more focused than ever on product offerings and how they are promoted to Mums and Dads – and everyone else. Any failure of disclosure or inaccuracy, and any misleading impression, will incur hefty legal penalties and pose a threat to brands and reputations.

Yet that’s only part of the burden. Marketers face a daily challenge in getting their promotional messages to market. At key points they must submit to a process of review by stakeholders and regulatory experts, setting up time-consuming and tormenting rounds of editing and reworking before a piece is judged ready for market. All of which delays the messages and dilutes their effectiveness.

Enter, “Law of the Jungle.”

Law of the Jungle provides a smart cloud-based solution that makes marketing compliance easy, fast, and reliable for the whole team. Greg San Miguel, CEO of the company, explains, “Backed by 20 years of experience in this space, we have built a solution for the marketing department and their stakeholders in legal, product and management.

“By operationalizing compliance at the commercial coalface we embed protection in the marketing process, where it belongs.”

The solution uses advanced algorithms and a mix of AI technologies to analyse draft copy and artwork, identify relevant legal and regulatory issues and policies, display and match mandatory wording and obligations, and guide users through the all important compliance judgment calls. And it’s backed by a sophisticated compliance-based workflow engine that enables easy collaboration and input without the bottlenecks, through to final approval and sign-off.

Using the solution, businesses now have an audit trail to demonstrate the required review and decision-making process under specific industry and product and category codes as well as the general law. Nothing is missed - privacy, intellectual property, too local to Australia as well as consumer laws are all covered.

And no media is excluded – TV, radio, print, digital, social.

Earlier versions of the solution pioneered the use of a purpose-built business rules engine to empower the business to get it right. These versions saw the solution enable over 2 million validations with respect to legal issues arising from marketing campaigns. “The results for businesses in target sectors were spectacular,” says San Miguel. “We did not expect anything like the impact we saw.”

A major entertainment group has cut two weeks out of its marketing process by using the solution to triage their risk. “That group has achieved 40,000 approvals through the solution.” A pharmaceutical company has seen a tenfold increase in marketing outputs – with no increase in the headcount of compliance reviewers.“The average number of reiterations (amendments to marketing drafts) has dropped from an average of 7 per job to 1.4.”

The introduction of AI features has changed the solution fundamentally. The solution now analyses drafts and yields compliance results almost instantaneously. “We cannot imagine a faster and easier way for marketers to manage the compliance hurdles, traditionally a slow and painful part of enterprise marketing.”

The program guides users through the tangle of legal issues impacting each job. Even a small communication can raise a multitude of issues,” says San Miguel. So a program likes ours has to ease the team through that detail, picking up the red flags and picking through a complex process.

The company’s smart solution not only helps organizations understand and manage their regulatory risks but also reduces time-to-market, increases efficiency and productivity, and ensures a smooth workflow through the right channels.

Traditional sign-off methods involve countless touchpoints and controls. But the complexity of managing that much movement, and that many reiterations, can actually increase the very risk the process is meant to reduce. So it’s perhaps not surprising that in an industry where a glitch in external communications means a regulatory breach, one company was able to bring the number of compliance issues down to zero – a fact noted by the regulator itself in a periodic report.

Law of the Jungle’s client base is not limited to the financial services sector but also spans across industries such as FMCG, retail, energy, telecommunications, pharmaceutical, and therapeutic products, among others. Unlike other regulatory and financial technology companies, Law of the Jungle is a solution for the end user, not just the legal or compliance intermediary. Empowering the whole organization slashes double handling and catch up by consultants. Ultimately the solution frees up the business team to concentrate on what they do best: great marketing.

The company, based in Australia, has an active presence in the UK and is seeing growth into other parts of the world, including the U.S.