Creativity AND Compliance

The cost of non-compliance can be high. So can the cost of non-creativity.

Some industries are more regulated than others (think finance, pharma) but no company is immune from having to understand and comply with rules. Thankfully experts abound who can help us all navigate them. However, sometimes there can be a culture clash between creative teams and compliance teams.

It’s very much worth trying to avoid that — and to find ways to understand one another. Actually meet and talk and listen to one another. The cost of non-compliance can be high. Yet, as you’ll see from the Coors and Budweiser examples below, the cost of non-creativity can be high too.

This is something we navigate a lot at BKW. In fact, our BKW Health website says “Creative (and, yes, compliant) web, mobile, video, social media, graphic design and digital marketing.” It felt worth elevating the idea of creativity AND compliance to our homepage.

OK. On to Coors and Budweiser. Alcohol websites in the US have to ask a visitor’s age before they can enter. There is no way around this. But It adds friction to the site experience and reduces traffic to the parts of the site that matter.

Check out how Coors is using this to their advantage by telling visitors when Coors was born. Age and heritage are part of their brand. And they playfully use it here. Even if someone “bounces” off the age-verification page and leaves the site without ever going deeper, at least they leave with a good sense of Coors’ personality. It feels to me like the lawyers and the creative team hung out over some Coors and really heard one another.

Not so with Budweiser. They are ALL compliance and not that much creativity. They come off like a cop or a parent. Probably the lawyers and creative team never met for a Bud.

Coors’ bounce rate (the percentage of people who leave a site without ever passing the homepage) per SimilarWeb is lower than Bud’s by about 4.5%. Like gold, lower here is good. And that 4.5%—with Bud’s traffic numbers—is a LOT of people lost to compliance without creativity. That’s a high cost to pay.