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Compliance management demands increasingly outpace human capacity for oversight and control in digital advertising. It is virtually impossible to manually monitor every creative, placement, and campaign parameter across a growing digital footprint. Furthermore, it opens the door to business risk. This is especially true for advertising in highly-regulated industries like pharmaceuticals, legal, healthcare, and real estate.
Even if you work with industries that aren’t beholden to strict regulations, companies of all sizes and industries have stringent brand guidelines and requirements. Non-compliant ads can result in fines, loss of consumer trust, or damage to your brand reputation.
Automation plays a critical role in addressing this challenge. Whether you’re managing high-stakes campaigns across multiple states or navigating stringent industry-specific regulations, automation is the key to staying compliant and protecting your brand at scale.
This article examines some of the core compliance and brand safety challenges in digital advertising. We’ll also explore why advertising automation is uniquely suited to help you improve regulatory adherence, specific approaches you can use, and an example of automation-enforced advertising at play in a highly-regulated industry.
Understanding compliance and brand safety challenges in advertising
Digital advertising compliance is never one-size-fits-all. Different industries face unique (but often overlapping) challenges when it comes to strict advertising regulations.
Highly-regulated industries face significant regulatory requirements from outside institutions, such as:
- Finance: Financial services must comply with guidelines from organizations like FINRA and the SEC to avoid misleading claims about products or investment returns.
- Healthcare: Pharma companies and healthcare providers are bound by regulations from the FDA, HIPAA, and state medical boards, among others.
- Retail: Retailers often go up against advertising transparency laws, particularly around pricing, promotions, and product availability.
- Real estate: Requirements from the Fair Housing Act extend beyond print ads and rental contracts. Digital real estate advertisers are required to maintain non-discriminatory practices across a variety of AdOps functions, including messaging and audience targeting.
Even outside these specific regulations, brand safety is a universal risk. Brand colors, visual assets, tone of voice: you need to ensure that your ads are distinctly on-brand across different channels, geographies, and even languages. A mismanaged campaign can result in accidentally placing ads in inappropriate spaces or conveying inconsistent messages, both of which damage trust.
There’s a lot to get right and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get it right. New ad formats, changing requirements, and updated brand guidelines all play a role in how quickly—and accurately—advertising teams can get campaigns refreshed or out the door. Factor in the rise of GenAI for building ad images or writing copy, and there are countless ways things can go wrong.
Luckily, automation is making it easier than ever to adhere to strict digital advertising compliance requirements while also reducing manual workloads.
The role of automation in regulatory compliance and brand safety
Automation makes it easier than ever for your advertising teams to keep compliance in check. By infusing automation guidelines and checkpoints into your advertising workflows, AdOps teams can ensure that even the most complex compliance requirements are managed with ease.
Here are a few examples of how automation rules can help enforce compliance and regulatory requirements.
Simplify approvals with adaptive workflows
Not all ads carry the same levels of risk or regulatory requirements. For example, brand campaigns may not have the same rigorous compliance rules as those promoting specific services or prescription drugs. This is where automated adaptive approval workflows shine.
Automation rules can be used to establish a tiered system of ad approvals for clearer and efficient workflows. Automation can flag keywords, images, or phrases that require closer scrutiny, escalating this content for more stringent reviews. At the same time, low-risk materials can be approved automatically, saving valuable time.
Automatically monitor keywords and content
AI excels at parsing vast amounts of data, but AI needs automation to power these analyses at scale. When paired with automation tools, teams can more easily monitor AI-generated ad copy for prohibited words or phrases before ads go live.
For example, you can customize Fluency’s Ad Copy Compliance Concerns notification to flag specific words, terms, or phrases that appear in your ads for rapid resolution. Fluency automatically scans accounts, ad copy, headlines, and other text for your flagged terms, notifies you when they’re found, and even gives you the option to edit or pause the ad directly within the alert.
These real-time ad copy compliance notifications give you full control of your ads with minimal manual work and stress. Without automation at play, you run the risk of launching and running non-compliant ads (especially if you’ve used GenAI to write them). Used in this way, automation is a crucial layer of protection.
Use standardized templates to launch and manage ads en masse
It’s hard to manage multichannel campaigns at scale while ensuring your ads are compliant. Standardized, pre-approved ad frameworks, like Fluency Blueprints, take the guesswork out of building compliant campaigns.
You can use Blueprints to set up pre-built advertising frameworks that help you configure compliant campaigns from step 1. For instance, a healthcare company may build a Google Ads campaign Blueprint that includes built-in placeholders for state-specific disclaimers or risk warnings.
Blueprints make it easy to codify your compliant ad campaign requirements while simultaneously reducing the manual work for campaign setup by up to 90%.
Build local, compliant ads directly from real-time data sources
When campaigns are localized, the scope for error grows substantially. In addition to federal requirements, certain industries may have different requirements from state to state as well.
Building ads directly from data sources guarantees you’re working with the most accurate and relevant data sets for optimal performance. These data sources can take a wide range of formats, such as a list of FDIC disclosures or legal-team-approved terms.
Once your data is tagged, you can plug these terms right into your ads to generate localized campaigns at scale. This eliminates manual data entry and ensures 100% alignment between your ads and your source data.
Since automation thrives in rule-based environments, you can generate an infinite number of campaign assets instantaneously by combining specific tags for different campaigns. For example, by pulling in tags like [Healthcare Company], [City], and [Medical Service], automation can create ad copy across your entire location portfolio with a click.
Take a look at these few examples:
- “The best [Medical Service] in [City] is at [Healthcare Company]!”
- “Hey [City], need help with [Medical Service]? Come to [Healthcare Company].”
- “Look no further than [Healthcare Company] for the best [Medical Service] in [City].”
- “[Healthcare Company] has the [Medical Service] that [City] has been looking for.”
Automated, on-brand deployment across multiple channels
Where there is manual work, there is an increased level of risk—something you can’t afford when compliance is key. Automation removes the need to manually program each ad set for every publisher.
Consider the example used above. Imagine generating this volume (and variety) of ads for every location of your business in an instant. Not only are you multiplying your ad copy generation efforts, but you’re accurately pairing the right messaging components for your entire multi-location ad portfolio without any additional manual effort.
Even better: a Digital Advertising Operating System (DAOS) like Fluency can push final ads directly to publishers like Google Ads, Basis Technologies, and Meta at one time. This saves you hours of working time without individually programming ads for every channel.
Simply put, you can ensure compliance measures are baked into your campaign generation without doing repetitive work.
Real-world case study: Using automation to adhere to digital advertising Fair Housing requirements
Union Street Media is a website and marketing intelligence platform for real estate agents. The 60-person company builds responsive realtor websites and manages both organic and paid advertising for real estate clients of all sizes. Their clients range from small mom-and-pop real estate brokers to enterprise companies with 500+ agents and offices all over the country.
Like all real estate advertising companies, they “live by the fair housing laws,” said Nicole Crisbacher, Senior Marketing Manager at Union Street Media. “These rules, which rule out discriminatory advertising, are in place for a good reason. But they also make it tough to run hyper-local real estate ads, which is what matters to our clients.”
Ad publishers like Google and Meta build “big bubbles” around Fair Housing Act requirements, according to Crisbacher. For example, Google Ads and Meta both limit their real estate targeting radius to 15 miles, which makes it hard to target based on demographic data like zip codes.
“Because of our industry, we don't have the same options as everybody else,” said Crisbacher. “It's not as easy to just click a few buttons and get the perfect person. We have to rely on data we collect ourselves or can upload into publishing platforms, which isn’t easy.”
Crisbacher and her team needed to adhere to Fair Housing Act regulations but wanted to improve hyper-local targeting efforts. By utilizing Fluency’s partnership with Basis Technologies, Union Street Media expanded its real estate advertising strategies to a new channel—programmatic—with minimal effort.
Now, Crisbacher’s team can build ads directly from MLS listing data, including a picture of a just-listed or just-sold home, and display it via Basis’ DSP to people within two to four miles of the home.
“I don’t know another way to do that digitally,” said Crisbacher. “We are one of the only companies doing programmatic real estate advertising. We wouldn’t be able to do that unless we had a platform that we could run all of our data through and turn it into ads.”
Watch their full story to see how they maintain compliance in a highly-regulated industry with automation:
Make automation your compliance partner
Automation makes it simpler, scalable, and safer to adhere to advertising compliance and brand safety guidelines. Using automation to reinforce ad content compliance, including assets generated by AI, helps you:
- Reduce risk: Using automation means there are fewer manual workflows, minimizing the risk of human error.
- Speed up ad approvals: Adaptive workflows keep things moving efficiently by alerting teams to high-risk assets or launching low-risk campaigns with fewer roadblocks.
- Improve profitability: Eliminating manual, repetitive tasks can shift your team’s work to higher-value initiatives that move the profitability needle.
- Strengthen brand integrity: Automation acts as guardrails that ensure every campaign aligns with brand voice, regulatory requirements, and safety guidelines.
- Launch local, on-brand ads in bulk: Templatized frameworks like Fluency Blueprints take the guesswork out of complex, compliant campaign setups.
Automation is quickly moving from a “nice to have” to an essential component for advertising compliance. Advertisers who embrace automated compliance solutions today will be better positioned to navigate new regulatory requirements in the future, all while maintaining agility for scaling their advertising efforts.
