byJoe Swatek
If you’ve worked in marketing for a few years, I’m sure this has happened to you. You send your marketing materials to your compliance person and they come back with changes and directives that reduce the impact of the copy or ruin the great creative idea.
The issue of compliance officers came up on The Financial Brand blog where the ACTON Marketing blog team was invited to write a post. We critiqued a self-mailer from Chase Bank. One of the reader comments said the format of the mailer was a great idea, but it wouldn’t make it past his compliance people.
I realize marketing professionals, especially at community banks and credit unions, face the compliance dilemma quite often.
Recently, for example, a compliance officer sent back a mail promotion we created for the client and added asterisks to each free checking reference. I pointed out, asterisks haven’t been used like this for over 15 years. Let’s face it. If no other financial institution in the country is using “Free Checking*” and none of them have been hand-slapped by the regulators in all that time, then it’s safe to say the asterisk is unnecessary.
But the marketing individual admitted she was afraid to contradict what the compliance person said.
We can grumble about compliance people all we want and make all sorts of nasty references about them behind their backs, but none of that accomplishes anything. So instead, let’s try to take a more active, positive approach.
