Crafting a Safe Path: How Marketing Agencies Can Navigate Legal Exposure

Legal exposure is an integral part of the advertising and marketing landscape. Each marketing agency needs to navigate the waters of their client’s legal risks to ensure that they do not help a specific campaign that could later see the brand on the chopping block. While it can be difficult to keep track of, Shaparak Marketing helps make this process easier.

What is legal exposure? Legal exposure is a term that we use in marketing and law to describe the legal liability that a brand or a brand’s marketing agency has to deal with concerning a specific campaign. In other words, if the advertisement winds up breaking a law or regulation, who is liable? This is a simple definition of the term, but it’s important in the advertising and marketing industry to understand.

What are legal risks? Legal risks are the specific repercussions that a brand and an agency could face if something goes wrong in a campaign gone awry. These risks can manifest in the form of lawsuits, fines, or criminal charges against the brand or their advertising agency. As can be imagined, this is a gray area of the law that needs to be dealt with carefully.

Why is it important? If you were to think of a certain demographic that is more likely to become legally exposed than a typical internet user, it would be a teenager. Teens can be a hard group to target; you have to be able to speak to them in such a way that they are still brought into the fold, and this often necessitates creative marketing techniques.

However, because a lot of teens might not be the most moralistically sound, they can be more likely to engage with a malicious advertisement, or they might even make their own ads that infringe on the intellectual property of another brand.

Legal exposure becomes a lot more imminent when you are dealing with a group of people who might not be as morally responsible as another group. As such, it’s important to understand the risks that can come from marketing campaigns and how to increase brand safety.

How can Shaparak Marketing Mitigate It? At Shaparak Marketing, we are well versed in a variety of innovative strategies, and our own creative marketing functions are up to par with the best. However, we take it a step further by ensuring that our assets are ready to go from day one. This means full transparency when it comes to our ability to handle legal exposure and leverage our tools to weed out advertisements that could cause legal trouble down the line.

What can be done to integrate these strategies into creative brainstorming sessions? It’s important to have an understanding of what the legal risks are before you create a campaign, and that’s why at Shaparak, we organize meetings that include a substantial amount of planning ahead of time. We meet with a client to understand what they are looking for with a certain campaign, and we do a risk assessment. At that point, we will help them to create a plan that reduces their legal exposure while maximizing their creative opportunities.

How should the legal department’s rules be communicated to the rest of the team? This is usually integrated into our planning process, so you do not need to worry about communicating all of the nuances of the legal department to the Shaparak marketing team. We have a thorough understanding of what the legal risks are, and we will let you know when and where the campaign is vulnerable.

What are some case studies on how advertising strategies were adapted to reduce legal exposure? It’s impossible to point to a particular study, but there are some generalizations that can be made when it comes to reducing legal exposure in your marketing campaigns. For example, FTC rules state that if a company wants to produce advertisements that could conflict with intellectual property, they need to receive a written consent from the target of the advertisement.

When is it important to educate the client about legal exposure? There are occasions when we have educated our clients on how a certain campaign could lead to more legal exposure than is necessary. However, during the planning phase of a campaign, we make sure that our clients are well aware of what the plan looks like and how their legal exposure could shift as a result of it.

How do you monitor for potential legal exposure in marketing campaigns? We usually go through a hands-on demonstration of how the campaigns look and perform, so if there are any potential legal issues, we are able to identify them before they become issues.

Does your marketing agency encourage a close relationship between the marketing department and the legal department? We work on a continual basis with our clients to ensure that all of the proper legal regulations are in place, so you can count on Shaparak Marketing to keep your creative marketing campaigns safeguarded. We minimize legal exposure to ensure the innovation of your marketing.