How to Ensure Brand Governance in Social Media Advertising

Ever wonder how some brands manage their social media without everything going off the rails? On average, a large brand handles about 5,600 social media accounts (Sprinklr proprietary data). Imagine trying to keep track of all those posts, tweets, access permissions and data management. It's a lot!  

And with so many accounts – one wrong move and you've got a major crisis on your hands. Add in the complexity of working with agencies, influencers and partners – you have a recipe for potential chaos. 

But why does this even matter? 🤔   

Let’s look at some examples to understand this better: 

• A large US fast food chain faced outrage after a tweet on International Women’s Day was misinterpreted 
• A US beer brand lost market share due to backlash over a social media promotion with a transgender influencer 
• A large German sportswear manufacturer ended a lucrative partnership with an influencer after he made widely criticized antisemitic remarks 
• In 2020, the X accounts of high-profile individuals and companies were hacked in a Bitcoin scam. Hackers gained access and posted fraudulent messages, causing confusion and damage to the brands' reputations

Now do you feel that your brand could be one misstep away from a similar disaster? 😧   

It's a scary thought, but the good news is that with the right governance, you can avoid these pitfalls. And the examples above show why strong brand governance in social media advertising is crucial. Without it, brands are at risk of costly mistakes and reputation damage. 

So, how can you ensure governance over your social ads?  

We’ve broken down the basics of governance in social media advertising in this blog – why it’s so crucial and the best strategies to keep your brand safe and effective.  

Ready to take control? Let’s dive in! 

The concept of governance in social advertising 

Governance in social advertising refers to the processes, policies and controls that enterprises put in place to streamline their social media advertising campaigns so they are always brand compliant. 

This includes: 

• Orchestrating brand-compliant campaigns across regions, channels and accounts 
• Managing user access and permissions 
• Enforcing content approval workflows 
• Monitoring ad spend and performance 
• Mitigating potential risks to reputation and ROAS 

 Here are the key components of governance in social advertising: 

• Regulatory compliance: Remember the days when ads could just pop up anywhere? Well, those days are gone. Regulatory compliance is the backbone of social media governance. Platforms must adhere to a plethora of laws and guidelines, from the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) guidelines in the U.S. Compliance, ensuring user data is protected and ads are truthful. 
• Content moderation: Ever wonder why you don’t see a flood of inappropriate content in your feed? That’s content moderation at work. Platforms employ a mix of AI algorithms and human moderators to review and filter content. This helps maintain a safe and engaging environment for users while ensuring advertisers' messages aren't lost in a sea of chaos. 

Fun fact: Facebook alone has a team of around 30,000 people working on safety and security, with approximately 15,000 of them being content reviewers.  

• Ad review and approval: Before ads even hit the digital shelves, it undergoes a rigorous review process. Platforms like Facebook and Google have strict policies about what can and cannot be advertised. This process helps prevent misleading, harmful or inappropriate ads from reaching users. 

Quick tip: Use the Ads Checklist to make sure your ads meet all the standards before going live. This checklist ensures quality, compliance and effectiveness by verifying various aspects of your ad. Creating and managing tasks based on this checklist will streamline your workflow and ensure your ads are approved quickly. 

• Transparency and Disclosure: Transparency isn't just a buzzword; it's a requirement. Social media platforms must ensure that users understand what they are being advertised to. This means clear labeling of sponsored posts, influencer partnerships and paid promotions. Transparent practices build trust and credibility with your audience. 

💡 You must have seen influencers on Instagram tagging paid partnerships. This practice makes it clear when a post is an ad.  

 Interesting Read: How to Measure Influencer Marketing’s Impact   

• Advertising policies: Each social media platform has its own set of advertising policies that must be adhered to. These policies cover what is acceptable in terms of content, targeting and more. Staying updated on these policies ensures that your ads are always compliant and reduces the risk of them being disapproved or removed. 

For example, Google Ads prohibits advertising certain products like counterfeit goods or services that promote hate, violence or discrimination.  

• Training and education: Provide ongoing training for the advertising team and agencies on best practices, policy updates and new advertising tools or platforms. Keeping the team informed ensures they can effectively manage and optimize ad campaigns. 
• Data privacy and security: Implement robust security protocols to protect advertising accounts from unauthorized access and cyber threats. This includes using strong passwords, two-factor authentication, strict access controls and regular security audits. Advertisers also play a role by ensuring they handle user data responsibly. 
• Crisis management: Developing a crisis management plan specifically for advertising-related issues is essential. This means having strategies ready to address negative feedback, misinformation or any other problems that might arise from social media ads. 

For instance, imagine launching a new ad campaign and it quickly sparks backlash due to an unintended offensive message. This is when a crisis management plan comes into play.  

🔥 Hot Tip: You can use AI and streamline your crisis management. Want to know how? Watch this video right now

Top challenges with governance of ad accounts 

Managing governance for ad accounts can be complex for even the biggest brands. Here are the top challenges you might face: 

• User access management: Picture this—you have hundreds, maybe thousands of ad accounts across various social channels. There are countless users, including internal teams, agencies and different markets. Without a unified system to control or remove user access, these accounts are sitting ducks for hackers. 
• Siloed campaign systems: There are thousands of campaigns run annually. Often, these campaigns are managed with disconnected systems for content control. Without a streamlined approval process or audit trails, you risk publishing the wrong content. This is a big deal, especially in regulated industries where non-compliance can lead to financial losses and damage to your brand's reputation. 
• Slow incident detection: Imagine not knowing something has gone wrong with your ad accounts until it's too late. Without robust systems to quickly detect issues like account hacks or content errors, it leads to delayed responses and increased brand risk. 

To address these challenges, brands are increasingly turning to comprehensive solutions like Sprinklr that can centralize control, mitigate risks and improve the efficiency of their social advertising efforts.   

Governance in social advertising: Why is it important? 

Social ad accounts are crucial yet vulnerable assets for brands. With a vast network of accounts being handled, with numerous users across internal teams, agencies and regional offices, it’s become increasingly challenging for organizations to maintain control and visibility over their advertising activities.  Effective governance of ad operations becomes vital here. Here’s why you should care about implementing governance for your social ads: 

Protecting your brand's reputation

Your brand’s reputation is everything. Without proper governance, unauthorized or inappropriate content can slip through the cracks, leading to potential PR disasters. Effective governance ensures that all content aligns with your brand’s values and messaging, preventing embarrassing mishaps and maintaining public trust. 

Manage Your Brand’s Reputation with 360 Degree Insights

WATCH NOW

Enhancing security and data privacy

Social media accounts often hold sensitive information, including customer data and proprietary campaign strategies. Without proper governance, these accounts are vulnerable to breaches and unauthorized access. Governance frameworks implement stringent security measures to protect your data – safeguarding against costly data breaches that affect your return on ad spend (ROAS). 

Wondering how it actually can affect your ROAS? Take a look at this and you will be startled! 👇 

How fraud impacts each stage of your advertising journey  

Streamlining ad operations

Managing multiple ad accounts with numerous users, including in-house and agency personnel, can be chaotic. Governance ensures that consistent processes and guidelines are followed – reducing errors and inefficiencies. This streamlined approach improves coordination, ensuring your campaigns run smoothly and effectively. 

Mitigating financial risks

Poor governance can lead to: 

• Significant financial losses from unauthorized ads
• Incorrect budget allocations
• Unapproved content 

By implementing strong governance, you can monitor and control ad spend more effectively, avoiding unnecessary expenditures and optimizing your budget for better returns.  

Ensuring compliance and transparency

Social media platforms have strict advertising policies. Without proper governance, you risk non-compliance, which can lead to penalties and account suspensions. Governance ensures that all ads meet platform regulations, maintaining compliance and building trust with your audience through transparency.

Managing crisis

Even the best-laid plans can go awry. A clear governance framework includes a crisis management plan specifically for advertising-related issues, such as negative feedback or misinformation. Being prepared with strategies and protocols helps you respond quickly and effectively, minimizing damage to your brand. 

 Related Read: How to Manage a Social Media Crisis Effectively  

Effective governance ensures your social advertising is secure and trustworthy — protecting from risks and maintaining consumer confidence. 

Top 5 ways to ensure governance in your social advertising  

Managing social advertising effectively requires strong governance to keep your brand secure and ad campaigns running smoothly.  Here are the top five strategies to ensure governance in your social advertising efforts:  

1. Access & controls 

Manage access control and user permissions across ad accounts, regions and business units from a centralized hub. This helps prevent unauthorized access and ensures that only the right people can make changes — reducing the risk of security breaches and brand reputation damage.  

Take the example of Philips. It faced significant challenges in managing its social advertising across 100 independent agency partners in over 30 countries. By implementing Sprinklr's Unified-CXM platform, Philips centralized its social media operations, providing the central marketing team with increased visibility and control. This centralized approach streamlined its workflows, enhanced transparency and ensured that only authorized personnel could access and modify its social media campaigns. 

Want to learn more on this strategy? Read the story right here. 

2. Campaign brief adherence & auto/manual approvals 

Enterprises should establish robust content approval workflows to ensure that all social advertising content adheres to brand guidelines, regulatory requirements and campaign objectives. This can be achieved through a combination of automated and manual approval processes. 

Automated approval workflows can quickly screen content for compliance, while manual reviews by subject matter experts can provide an additional layer of oversight.

This dual approach helps organizations maintain brand consistency and mitigate the risk of publishing non-compliant or inappropriate content. 

3. Audit logs & archival 

Maintaining comprehensive audit logs and archiving all actions related to your ad campaigns helps maintain transparency and accountability. This includes tracking: 

• Content changes 
• User actions  
• Campaign performance data 

These logs can track who made changes, when they were made and what exactly was altered. This way, you can quickly respond to any issues that may arise and demonstrate the impact of your advertising efforts to stakeholders.  

4. Budget/campaign governance & guardrails 

Establishing centralized control over advertising budgets and campaign spending is essential for governance. Implement clear guardrails and approval workflows to prevent unauthorized or excessive expenditure, ensuring that marketing investments are aligned with strategic objectives. This can include setting daily or total budget caps and defining acceptable performance metrics.  

5. Automated risk alerts & mitigation 

Implementing AI-powered anomaly detection and risk monitoring systems can help brands quickly identify and mitigate potential issues, such as security breaches, inappropriate content, sudden changes in campaign performance or spikes in spending. By automating the process of pausing or removing at-risk ads, you can minimize the impact on brand reputation and marketing outcomes. 

Learn how you can manage your brand reputation and streamline your approach! 

Sprinklr, for example, employs automated risk alerts which helps to monitor a brand’s social media advertising. If there is a sudden surge in negative feedback, the system alerts the relevant team members. This allows you to investigate and address the issue promptly, minimizing potential damage.   

Wait, there’s more! 

There’s an additional way you can ensure ad governance on all your social channels – it’s by using a single AI-powered platform. Learn how right below!👇   

How Sprinklr simplifies ad governance for leading brands 

A comprehensive platform like Sprinklr provides a centralized solution for governing social advertising activities.  

Here's how it simplifies ad governance: 

1. Centralized governance 

Sprinklr makes it easy to manage access control and user permissions from a central hub, giving you global visibility across all advertising accounts. By removing native access for most users and implementing role and group-level permissions, it reduces the risk of hacking, data loss and brand damage.  

2. Risk mitigation 

Sprinklr helps you set up approval paths to ensure content complies with industry regulations. Centralized budget controls prevent rogue spending. AI-powered anomaly detection identifies risks quickly, allowing you to react faster and automatically pause at-risk ads.   

3. Approval workflows  

In Sprinklr, you can define automated approval workflows to ensure governance and quality across your advertising campaigns and creatives.  

This includes:  

• Ad campaign approval: Send campaigns and ad variants for approval to ensure they meet guidelines before publication.  
• Ad creative approvals: Send ad creatives for approval to ensure they meet necessary standards.   
• Ad approvals configuration: Create tiered approval paths to send ads for approval before publishing. 

It has an added feature called the Ads Checklist. It’s a comprehensive set of criteria designed to ensure that ads meet specific standards before they are approved and live. This feature allows users to create and manage tasks that serve as guidelines for ads, enhancing quality, compliance and effectiveness. The structured workflow reduces errors and streamlines the ad approval process. Additionally, Sprinklr provided the following ad approval capabilities: 

• Email approvals: Sprinklr introduces Email Approvals, allowing approvers to review and approve ad variants or creatives via email without needing a Sprinklr login. This familiar workflow ensures efficiency and accessibility. 

• Tracking approvals & rejections: Sprinklr’s Value Realization Dashboards track approvals and rejections based on performance indices, offering transparency around governance KPIs like approval rates and SLAs. This helps measure and realize the value of strong approval frameworks. 

• Configuring approval workflows: Sprinklr allows you to define and automate approval paths using Approval Queues, Tiered Approvals and Rules, ensuring that ads adhere to your team’s workflow and approval requirements. 

4. Automated QA Checklist  

Eliminate the risk of off-brand advertising with Sprinklr's Automated QA Checklist. This user-defined checklist applies automatically to all campaigns, providing an extra level of governance. 

But why is this important?

• Reduces delays in launching campaigns by automating manual evaluation processes. 
• Ensures consistent reviews, minimizing errors and non-compliance with brand guidelines. 

What does this checklist actually do? 

• Customizable guidelines: Tailor checklists to specific brands or campaign types. 
• Error reduction: Automate checklist application to expedite campaign launches. 
• Collaborative use: Use collaboratively across teams to maintain alignment. 

Why do you need this? 

Sprinklr’s automated QA checklist replaces manual methods like Excel, offering a seamless and efficient way to maintain brand compliance across advertising efforts. This system applies the first level of checks, saving time and increasing accuracy.   

How and Why to Create Your Own Social Media Brand Guidelines

DOWNLOAD NOW

5. Ads roles and permissions  

Sprinklr helps you analyze, optimize and eliminate governance threats, ensuring consistent experiences at every touchpoint. 

Governance at Sprinklr is controlled in 3 levels: 

• Role: Determines tool access within the platform and what actions users can take. 
• User type: Defines access to other workspaces and admin features. 
• Account access: Specifies which accounts users can publish from, report on and engage with. 

 Best practices for ads roles & permissions: 

• Global roles: Create four personas (Ads Media Planner, Ads Media Practitioner, Ads Creative Publisher, Ads Insights Analyst) to streamline roles and permissions. 

• Ad account area permissions: Restrict ad accounts for different users or groups to maintain confidentiality and reduce risks. 
• Ad account deactivations: Custom reporting in Sprinklr provides visibility into deactivated accounts, preventing disruptions in ad publishing. 

• Multi-token feature: Allows multiple users to add the same ad account, maintaining account activity even if one user’s access token is deactivated. This ensures continuous campaign management without interruptions. 

With Sprinklr, you gain complete visibility of paid campaigns across 10+ social channels — enabling you to orchestrate your ad strategies and measure outcomes from a single platform. By unifying planning, production and campaign delivery, it enhances collaboration and ensures efficient use of budgets and resources.    

Closing notes 

In the words of Benjamin Franklin, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." Good governance is that ounce of prevention in social media advertising — ensuring your brand stays secure and your campaigns run smoothly. You've learned about the importance of centralized control, compliance, detailed logs, clear boundaries and so much more. Now it's time to put these insights into action. 

Remember, good governance isn't just about avoiding pitfalls — it's about creating a strong foundation for success. So, take what you've learned, seize the power of governance and watch your social media ads really take off. 

Here's to smarter, safer and more successful campaigns! 🚀 

And why not with a tool like Sprinklr? Try it out right here ⬇️