Digital Marketing Agencies near you

The ACCC's position is blunt: claims should be true, accurate and based on reasonable grounds, and it makes no difference whether a business intended to mislead. That covers advertising, packaging, websites and social posts alike. If you claim to be the fastest, the cheapest or the most experienced, you need something behind it before the ad runs, not after a complaint.

The ACCC can require a business to back up claims it makes about its products or services. Where a claim is about the future, the business has to show it had reasonable grounds for making it. In practice that means the agency should be keeping the evidence file with the creative, and you should be able to see it.

Liability sits with the advertiser, not only the agency. A scope of work that tells you who signs off on claims, who holds the substantiation and what happens if a regulator asks is worth more than a page of reporting promises.

The Privacy Act 1988 covers businesses with an annual turnover of more than 3 million Australian dollars in any financial year since 2002, plus health service providers, businesses that trade in personal information, Commonwealth contractors and a handful of other categories regardless of size. Plenty of growing Australian businesses cross that line without noticing, and the agency running their CRM is usually the first to see it.

Where the Act applies, Australian Privacy Principle 7 governs using personal information for direct marketing. It does not cover email or SMS already caught by the Spam Act, but it does cover addressed mail, targeted online advertising built on personal information, and marketing in a mobile app. Sensitive information needs consent, and every affected person must be given a simple way to opt out.

The Notifiable Data Breaches scheme applies to the same businesses. If a breach of your marketing database is likely to cause serious harm, you have to notify affected people and the OAIC, and an entity must take all reasonable steps to complete its assessment of a suspected breach within 30 calendar days of becoming aware of it. Ask where your list lives and who else can reach it.

Most engagements open with an audit: existing channels, analytics, past spend, what the business actually earns from a customer. Insist that the audit produces a baseline you agree on, because everything reported later is measured against it.

Then comes a plan with a channel mix, a budget split between media and management fees, and a small number of metrics you both accept as the scoreboard. Vague goals such as brand awareness are where disputes start. Leads, bookings, qualified enquiries and revenue are harder to argue about.

Execution settles into a rhythm of build, measure and adjust, usually with a monthly review. Early months are for learning, not for judging. Set a review point far enough out that the data means something, and agree in writing what happens at that point if the numbers are not there.

Agency services bought by an Australian business are generally covered by the consumer guarantees in the Australian Consumer Law, which apply to services costing less than 100,000 Australian dollars and to more expensive ones normally bought for personal or domestic use. The guarantees are that services are supplied with due care and skill, are fit for any purpose you told the agency about, and are delivered within a reasonable time.

These rights cannot be taken away by anything the business says or does. A clause in a retainer that tries to exclude them does not work, and telling a client the contract overrides them is itself a problem under the law.

Where the failure is minor, the agency gets the chance to fix it. Where it is major, the client chooses between cancelling and recovering the value of what was not delivered, or keeping the work and seeking compensation for the difference in value. The ACCC handles widespread problems; individual disputes usually go to the state or territory consumer protection agency.