How a Global CPG Company Avoided a Multi-Million-Dollar Non-Compliance Risk
Situation
A multinational consumer goods company and powerhouse advertiser owns dozens of brands and often uses large volumes of digital assets across their omnichannel marketing campaigns.
Challenge
The company’s rights management system flagged several assets that featured a model whose contract terms had expired. Images and video of the model needed to be taken down immediately, however images and videos containing the expired talent rights were being used for multiple campaigns across multiple channels and in multiple formats. The company had no way of quickly pinpointing where assets were being used in production.
As an attempt to resolve the issue, marketing supplemented their internal teams with third-party agency resources to manually search websites, social media channels, and video-sharing platforms. They performed visual and Google Images searches to identify photos featuring the model that were still live. However, Google Images does not provide reverse-search for videos, the crawlers do not go into all pages in many cases, and the tool does not thoroughly capture content on social media sites or websites that are frequently updated.
The company found that even after substantial effort and cost, they were still discovering assets that were in violation. Furthermore, the manual search efforts were proving to be too time consuming. For example, a human might need to watch hundreds of videos from end to end to identify a 10-second clip—a task that could take multiple days. Aware that their risk exposure increased with each day the content in violation was not taken down, they felt pressure to find a more efficient strategy.
Automation became a must.
Solution
The company turned to FADEL for its content-tracking capabilities, available as both a SaaS tool for self-service needs or as an on-demand service to minimize resource allocation. The FADEL Managed Services team was provided with 15 images and 9 videos and tasked with searching 275 channels, including brand websites and subdomains, third-party e-commerce sites, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, to turn up matches for takedown. Using the powerful Brand Vision – Content Tracking platform, the FADEL team returned 246,291 images and 5887 videos—a volume that would be practically impossible to address one by one, using manual search. Among those files, the software turned up 31 video matches – often 10-second clips within 2-minute videos – and 19 image matches, including several that had been clipped or altered. Site URLs, page URLs, and image URLs were delivered to the company for immediate takedown.
Results
FADEL’s content tracking as a service mitigated the multinational’s non-compliance risk. Had the content not been taken down, implications included overage fees and lawsuits projected to be in the multiple millions, as well as adversarial relations with talent and talent agencies. In addition, the company was able to redirect their creative teams to their highest use, producing innovative campaigns that generate revenue rather than fighting fires that they didn’t have the proper tools to fight. By hiring FADEL’s skilled Managed Services team, what would have been weeks of work was executed in just three days, meeting the client’s need for rapid takedowns and eliminating the need to burden costly creative resources with searching through hundreds of thousands of pages.
