As you are involved in the production and transmission of marketing content before the official release of your new products, the leak risk of the content that you exchange with your suppliers is among the highest. This is often because your contract with them is not firm enough or does not include clauses regarding embargoed content. Another reason may be that your product raises a lot of expectations from fans, which your partners are eager to satisfy, to the detriment of your business relationship.

All industries can be subject to content leaks. Whether the risk is high or low depends, amongst others, on the number of stakeholders involved. Regarding the impact of a content leak, it depends on the nature of your business:

• Your products, their design or the visuals used for their marketing circulate on the Internet, but they can also be used by competitors or counterfeiters.
• Your strategic activities require digitization for sharing, but this makes them more easily copied.
• The gray market can hurt your business.
• Leaking your promotional content before official reveal is a business danger and can ruin your marketing efforts.

Brands need to learn where potential leaks can happen in their workflow and how to protect their content.

From the moment you share information outside your organization, the risk of content leak appears. The more stakeholders involved, the higher the risk. External collaborators and third-party stakeholders should be asked the same level of confidentiality than internal team members. Even if an NDA agreement has been put in place, be aware that it is not always sufficient because it doesn’t prevent someone from disclosing confidential information.

Willingly or negligently, your recipients can play a role in the risk of your content leaking. The major risk can come from several sources, internal as well as external, first level or intermediary actors. To avoid the risk of leakage, be sure to use a unique and invisible ID like Imatag to track your content and improve trust with your suppliers.