Best Practices for a Winning Brand-Agency Relationship

Marketing teams and advertising agencies—whether internal or external—create campaigns that become the face of a brand. Yet the ultimate accountability for the content used in these marketing campaigns lies with the brand. In order to establish a frictionless process for campaign creation and brand protection, best practices for transparency and communication need to be put in place. An agreed-upon process ensures objectives are clear, everyone is working towards the same goal, and that campaigns are consistent with the brand image and strategy. 

This blog outlines steps that brands can take to enhance brand-agency collaboration so campaigns remain consistent, compliant, and on-brand. We also share a case study of the results FADEL customer Opella (formerly Sanofi Consumer Healthcare) US has achieved by implementing these best practices.

According to a study by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), the top legal concerns of in-house agencies include contracting with talent and rights clearance. Many agencies—whether internal or external—aren’t capturing contractual data upfront and don’t have the tools to manage the rights clearance process. These problems are compounded once the campaign is handed over to the brand for distribution. Although the brand is legally liable to comply with copyright laws, it often does not have the access it needs to rights data in order to confidently launch a campaign or reuse high-performing campaign assets.

According to an American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA) report, the average cost of litigating a copyright infringement case in federal court from pre-trial through the appeals process is $278,000, and cases may take over a year to litigate. That is just the average—some of the lawsuits go into the multi-millions, especially if you’re using celebrity content. Beyond the financial risk, if you get sued for using content that you do not have the copyright holder’s permission to use, it could tarnish your reputation with your consumers, other agency partners, and the talent you work with. 

In a recent webinar, our polls showed that attendees were equally split between whether they used internal or external agencies (21% each), with more than half (57%) using both. Regardless, the challenges we see are the same: collaboration, communication, capturing asset rights, and compliance. These four best practices are the foundation of a healthy brand-agency relationship and underpin campaign success.

Collaboration

A collaborative relationship ensures that brand objectives for each campaign are met by the agency, that the campaign assets positively portray the brand, and that the campaign is consistent with their brand image. The key to collaboration is transparency between the brand and the agency. According to the Havas and Meaningful Brands Special Report on the Client Agency Barometer, 80% of marketing leaders view transparency as a crucial component of client-agency relationships. It is critical to have visibility into what’s happening on both sides of the fence to establish an effective working relationship.

Communication

Communication between the brand and agency is the basis for collaboration. This entails establishing agreed-upon processes and channels for sharing project information and progress. Communication is essentially the gateway to transparency. However, larger brands routinely work with dozens of external agencies, while internal agencies are often siloed within the organization. Both situations can impede communication flow, increasing the risk of misunderstandings that lead to scrap and rework and adding tension to the brand-agency relationship.

Capturing Asset Rights

Capturing talent agreements, rights, and restrictions and associating them with the content gives brands the ability to maintain effective campaign asset management. Brands often don’t have visibility into the underlying rights data associated with their digital content, yet they are accountable from a legal perspective. If a campaign is successful, brands will want to reuse the content and perhaps expand it to other channels, markets, or product lines. If rights are not associated with assets, the brand will have to go back to the agency and ask about terms for each asset, sacrificing agility.

Compliance

Compliance with intellectual property usage rights is essential to campaign success, and visibility into those terms allows brands to check that a campaign is cleared for distribution as well as whether campaign assets are available for reuse. If a brand publishes a campaign and gets sued because certain assets were used in unauthorized regions, formats, or timeframes, it defeats the whole purpose of the campaign. Having the ability to easily track expirations and usage terms helps brands maintain compliance.

While these may seem like simple concepts on the surface, implementing them can prove challenging. Many brands work with multiple agencies, internal and external, making standardized execution of the 4 Cs more difficult. 

1. Establish a process

Having a communication and workflow management process that spans the campaign lifecycle will create transparency and efficiencies. It should take into account the 4 Cs: collaboration, communication, capturing asset rights, and compliance. The process should be well documented and provide clear detail on how your brand works with agency partners and what your expectations are. This includes setting objectives, interaction intervals, tasks that need to happen on both sides, a methodology for capturing rights and sharing assets, milestones that will require brand approval, and deliverables. Design a repeatable process that will apply to every project and every agency. This will help with consistency as well as streamline the onboarding of new agencies.

2. Enforce your process

Having a process is not helpful unless it is followed. First, it is important to ensure that all parties understand your process and expectations—both on the brand and agency side. It is effective to share your process in advance, reiterate it in the project kickoff meeting, and get signoff from all participants. This establishes a shared way of working, empowering all team members to reference the agreed-upon process if protocol is not being followed.

3. Develop a legal and/or brand-focused clearance process

Make sure you have a well-defined process that end users can follow to make sure they’re checking the rights data for all digital files before using them in a campaign. If you’re going to establish and enforce a process for capturing rights, you want your end users to have access to run clearance checks, be able to pull reporting on expiration dates, and track content usage and violations. Again, it is important to communicate and get acknowledgment from all team members that they understand the rights clearance process. This acknowledgment makes enforcing the process easier. 

4. Implement the proper technology

Within the martech toolset, your DAM platform and content services capabilities are certainly at the core, yet an effective digital rights management (DRM) toolset is essential for compliance. To have full transparency into the talent rights for assets created or provided by an agency, you need a place to put them, and metadata fields are not up to that task. Being able to extend your DAM so you can capture and track talent agreements and rights will mitigate the risk of misuse. This includes a database and a tool to access it in a way that you can utilize, analyze, and leverage that data to enforce compliance.

5. Gather rights upfront

Having to dig up rights at the end of a campaign or once it has already been launched creates a lot of unnecessary work. Frontload the process to ensure agencies capture rights data at the time they are hiring talent and signing agreements with them as well as when they acquire or develop a digital file. This is especially important as more and more campaigns involve compound assets that have multiple components with multiple associated usage terms. As asset relationships become more complex, gathering rights upfront will make it easier to keep track of compliance throughout the project lifecycle.

A Costly Oversight

An asset was discovered that had been syndicated all over the world and was past its expiration date. This sparked an all-hands audit to identify all published assets with their associated rights. Opella then manually compared assets in their DAM against syndicated media, identified whether they had expired and, if so, took them down. This took a significant amount of time and came at a steep cost.

The Underlying Problem

Asset rights were managed outside of the brand’s view. Agencies had a printout of the rights in their file folders, and, when Opella wanted to clear or reuse an asset or campaign, locating the rights required a back-and-forth of emails between the brand and agency. This could take up to a week, causing long-term impacts on production. Since they did not have visibility into rights for assets that were in syndication, violations had the potential to be widespread. They needed to implement a digital rights management strategy.

A two-phased solution

1. Bring digital rights management in-house

Opella’s first step was to bring all rights agreements in-house, centralizing them in their DAM. Their immediate goals for this phase were to:

• Ensure consistent and uniform data handling of rights
• Eliminate delays with the ability to quickly retrieve rights
• Reduce potential errors and oversights that opened them up to non-compliance risk

However, bringing DRM in-house still required someone to manage requests for use, download the rights information, and send it to the requester. Although an improvement, the process was still time-consuming, inefficient, and open to error, highlighting the immediate need for a rights management tool in their DAM. 

Opella wanted a digital rights management solution that would act as a safeguard against potential legal issues while at the same time enhancing operational efficiency. Ideally, it would have real-time tracking and alert functionality to ensure compliance and eliminate the need for manual checks.

2. Integrate advanced DRM with their DAM

The second phase was to identify and onboard a technology solution for digital rights management. Opella US selected FADEL Brand Vision – Rights Cloud, which seamlessly connects to their Acquia DAM. Rights Cloud houses all talent agreements and rights in one centralized location, allowing instant clearance checks either directly from the DAM or from the Rights Cloud platform. 

With Rights Cloud, Opella can easily run a report to identify syndicated assets nearing their expiration dates that are in production globally. These can then either be turned off in the DAM so they no longer appear as available for downstream syndication, or renewed. 

• Simple rights management with rapid adoption thanks to the intuitive design 
• Real-time updates and dashboard visibility into available assets across brands and agencies
• Effective campaign collaboration with a centralized location for brand information
• Fewer communication mix-ups and misunderstandings
• Assured compliance with instantaneous rights clearance
• Greater agility with brand and agency self-service
• A consistent, standardized format for recording rights
• On-demand reporting for instant audits

With Rights Cloud, brands can gain confidence in campaign asset management by keeping close tabs on digital rights. With centralized storage of license agreements for easy reference and renewal and real-time rights clearance checks to make sure assets are used within their legal parameters, brands mitigate compliance risk and increase operational efficiency. Content Tracking even protects brands post-distribution with content monitoring that detects potential issues before they escalate. 

At the same time, agencies can streamline campaign management and updates with a centralized view of what is available for use. The collaborative workflow supported by Rights Cloud connects team members for quicker feedback and approvals. Plus, historical tracking with comprehensive logs of asset usage ensure transparency and accountability.

Contact FADEL today for a demo of Rights Cloud with Content Tracking.