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Friday, Mar 29, 2024

Co-Optimum Offers Compliance in a Few Clicks

The world of brand compliance isn’t glamorous. But Sherman Oaks-based Co-Optimum, which largely acts as a liaison between national brands and local resellers, is doing its best to make it sleek and easy for corporate customers to be compliant. The local advertising and marketing services firm is rolling out a new tool to package co-op payments and brand compliance together online in one central location. “All a CEO needs to do to increase brand value is manage compliance,” said Tom White, vice president of corporate development. Co-Optimum’s new tool, Connect-Plus, aims to help customers do just that, he said. The company is rolling out the online feature to clients such as Ferrari, Toyota and Farmer’s Insurance. The goal is to ease the methods by which local retailers are paid for local advertising while maintaining the image of the national company, White said. The firm decided late last year to rebrand the services it already had been offering and to add a few more services in an effort to streamline its workflow and offer ease to clients with compliance concerns, said Larry Feder, who founded Co-Optimum in 1987. “With the larger clients, it’s all about compliance,” he said. Co-Optimum’s new model seeks to take the guesswork out of designing an ad for local markets. For example, retailers now can log-on to their Connect-Plus portal, print pre-prepared ads, or add local flair to them, and submit them for approval. With the online process, approval can be done in minutes, said Vincent Ruiz, director of operations for the company. And for retailers on a tight budget, the knowledge that they’re going to be reimbursed from the national company they represent can mean the difference between running the ad or not, he said. For national brands, the benefit is knowing that their company is being represented in a way consistent with their goals or self-image. Since the firm started rolling out the new online-focused process, customers have been responding, Ruiz said. “What we’re noticing is that the manufacturers are engaging in this,” he said. “It’s a point and click without having to come to us and ask.” Feder notes that enabling this approach also will help with multimedia and multi-channel campaigns, taking the company into the future. He started Co-Optimum as a co-op advertising management company, contracting with the national brands. Whenever a local retailer placed an advertisement in a San Fernando Valley newspaper, or placed a radio spot, the retailer would send the ad to his firm for payment from the national client. “We were doing brand compliance from the beginning, I just don’t think we knew it,” Feder said. At the time, Co-Optimum dealt mostly with the co-op side of the business, which Feder calls the accounting side. But as the years went by, brand image became more important. Companies looked at the representation of their company in the ad and it played a bigger part in how much national companies were willing to pay for the ad and whether they’d rather have the ad reworked to improve its quality. The company began to look more and more at ways to make the process easier for both sides, and the Internet helped speed that along. “There are only a few left around here who are still taking out their rulers,” Ruiz said. As the company changes to meet the needs of its clients, it benefits from its customers’ loyalty, officials say. “This is an efficient, cost-effective way to grow,” White said. “People are always going to advertise, you’re going to need this.”

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