Meeting in the middle: How having a clear understanding of marketing plays into company compliance practices

The past year has seen an increasing number of operators shifting the responsibility of affiliate compliance away from marketeers and into a dedicated role or team where accountability is easier to track.

It’s a logical step because having someone solely responsible for ensuring compliance is far safer for the business than mixing it with a potentially conflicting marketing role. But it also requires the compliance officer to not only understand the role of an affiliate marketing manager but also the motivators that the business uses to drive them.

When affiliate compliance first became big news in the UK around the end of 2017, it left business owners with a quandary. With the emphasis being put on the operator to ensure their affiliates were compliant came penalties which could run to hundreds of thousands if not millions of pounds and many speculators suggested that it could be even worse.

The immediate issues for the operator were the need to delegate the responsibility within the organisation, ensure that the affiliate landscape was in a compliant state as quickly as possible and not least, to manage the impact of this new task on pre-arranged budgets.

For many, the obvious choice was to pass the responsibility to the affiliate team who understood what the issues could be and were also at the coalface. While not perhaps welcomed by staff trained primarily for marketing roles, there was a widely appreciated acceptance that this was a necessary task which, done right, should actually have a lasting benefit for both players and the business.

At this stage, it made perfect sense for many and looking back you have to say that on the whole they’ve done a great job: the affiliate landscape is much tidier than it was a year ago. There is however a longer-term issue: marketing and compliance can often come into conflict. We saw a perfect example of this recently when Rightlander uncovered some very unethical affiliate activities across third-party ad services with the resultant uncompliant and misleading “sponsored content” appearing on a national newspaper site.

The operator in question was not a Rightlander client, however, when we reached out to the affiliate program manager, who clearly had the responsibility of managing this “very good” affiliate and was presumably responsible for ensuring a compliant marketing strategy, they asked about how easy the issue was to find. This was a line of questioning which highlighted the dilemma faced by marketing staff with targets to meet. Unfortunately, it is a fact of life that some unethical advertising methods can by their very nature generate high volumes of traffic.

If that issue had been the responsibility of a compliance officer or a licence holder to deal with, that conversation would never have happened: the action required is pretty obvious.

But events such as this also have the potential to lead to discord between the affiliate managers tasked with bringing in traffic and the compliance department, a side-effect of which could result in the former becoming less than transparent in their dealings with the latter, a situation that could have severe repercussions for the business.

If the business incentivises staff with disregard for non-compliant affiliate or marketing content, this may need addressing. Similarly, if the person or persons you make accountable for compliance are also marketing your business, perhaps you should think about handing responsibility to a dedicated compliance officer and maybe one who understands marketing or who is able to maintain a good relationship with the marketing team.

If you already have a dedicated compliance team, affiliate compliance might nestle nicely into their role, but it is important to ensure that they have total transparency from the marketing staff or they run the risk of not being given the full picture.

A number of our clients have successfully re-assigned marketing staff into dedicated compliance roles with accountability attached and this seems to be proving effective.

Author: Ian Sims, founder, Rightlander

Ian Sims is the founder of Rightlander, a state-of-the-art affiliate compliance platform that allows affiliates and operators to identify potentially non-compliant content in regulated jurisdictions. Prior to establishing Rightlander, Sims was an egaming affiliate for 13 years.