Overview
Great advertising needs a different type of legal advice. Our advertising team can help you to be disruptive - while you push boundaries, they will support you in managing the risk. Grounded in the digital age, the team understands you need solutions and immediate assistance or the moment might be gone.
Advertising law has changed. Native ads, vlogger campaigns, the Internet of Things - they all require new thinking on legal risk. Real-time marketing demands real-time lawyering. Client agency contracts need to account for new issues, from viewability and ad fraud to the moderation of social media. Publishers are looking to combat ad blocking. Sponsors demand app and data rights as a matter of course.
But other things haven't changed. Creative teams still want contracts to be sorted with the minimum of fuss so that they can get on with producing the work. Your competitors need to be kept in check. Regulatory issues need to be resolved before they damage your brand. And no-one wants over-cautious legal input to obscure the message.
For advice that works, however new the platform and however creative the concept, please get in touch with Dan Smith, head of our UK advertising law team.
Experience
If it touches advertising or marketing, we advise on it. Our experience includes:
- Offering 'hotline' support to brand owners and agencies, providing advice and clearance for claims, copy, campaigns and promotions, where necessary with an immediate turnaround. Years of working in this way with household names such as Unilever, Volkswagen Group, Birds Eye Iglo and Superdrug means we understand what marketing teams and their in-house colleagues need from their legal advisors when it comes to advertising reviews.
- Working on the highest profile event and sponsorship deals and activations, including the Olympic Games, Premier League and Serie A football teams, the FA, the Football League, major new stadia, cricket, golf, motor racing, television and music festival properties and Santander Cycles - one of London's most visible sponsorship properties. Specialising in ambush marketing advice over numerous Olympic and World Cup cycles.
- Providing creative solutions to enable brands and agencies to maximise the benefits of everything from native advertising and influencer campaigns to real-time marketing in social media. Training marketing teams in compliance in digital media and elsewhere and providing strategic direction to smooth the clearance process and deliver more compliant materials, earlier and at less cost.
- Helping clients to preserve market share, with timely and effective challenges to competitor advertising, before the ASA, in the courts or through the client's own marketing. We have advised on some of Europe's biggest comparative advertising cases (including Kingspan v Rockwool) but we also help clients to successfully dispose of many disputes before they escalate.
- Advising on global, pan-European and local contracts for creative and advertising services, media buying and advertising technology.
- Advising and co-ordinating advice from our overseas offices and partner firms on international campaigns and contracts. With team members in Germany, France and Canada and a network of specialist contacts elsewhere, we are well placed to advise global brands and agency networks.
- Embedding a series of junior lawyers into a global brand owner's advertising and marketing team over the course of many years, giving us a pool of resource trained 'on the ground' in industry and able to provide cost-effective support to our clients.
