Marketing Claims Management: How Companies Keep Advertising Claims Traceable
What a Marketing Claim Needs Today: Substantiation, Expiry Dates and an Audit Trail
A marketing claim is any statement about a product's characteristics, effects, or benefits, whether expressed as text, a brand name, or an image. This article focuses specifically on the substantiation-related part of that: claims based on a study, a test, a certificate, or an approval, and that therefore must be actively substantiated and kept up to date, for example regarding efficacy, safety, or environmental impact.
As of September 27, 2026, EU Directive 2024/825 (EmpCo, Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition) becomes binding in Germany. It prohibits blanket environmental claims such as "climate neutral" or "environmentally friendly" without verifiable data, and provides for fines of up to 4 percent of annual turnover for violations. There is no transition period for packaging already printed or marketing materials already published. Companies that don't currently know where a given claim has been used must, in case of doubt, manually check every single piece of material. A prominent example is Ritter Sport: the chocolate manufacturer has been covering existing bars with stickers for months to hide a sustainability claim about its cocoa sourcing that it had used for years and that no longer meets the new requirements.
EmpCo Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg
EmpCo applies exclusively to environmental and sustainability claims. The underlying problem is older and cuts across every industry: any statement based on a study, a test, or an approval is subject to a substantiation requirement, regardless of product category.
| Industry | Legal basis | Example claim |
|---|---|---|
| Pharma | Therapeutic Products Advertising Act (HWG) | "Relieves pain in 15 minutes" |
| Food | Health Claims Regulation (EC) 1924/2006 | "High in Vitamin C" |
| Cosmetics | Cosmetic Claims Regulation (EU) 655/2013 | "Dermatologically tested" |
| Cleaning/Hygiene | Biocidal Products Regulation (EU) 528/2012 | "Removes 99.99% of bacteria" |
| All industries | Act Against Unfair Competition (UWG) | "Germany's most popular product of its kind" |
Five different legal bases, one shared operational problem: who published which claim, where, and when, and what it's based on.
The Real Problem: Where Was a Given Claim Used?
A cleaning-product manufacturer advertises its product as removing 99.99 percent of bacteria, based on a 2023 lab study. If the approval for the underlying biocidal active substances expires, or a new study yields different results, the claim has to change everywhere it appears, on every package, every flyer, every product page, and every social media post. The same applies in the pharmaceutical industry to efficacy claims about a medicine whenever new study data or a changed approval comes in.
The real operational problem isn't the individual statement itself, but tracking it across time and channels: which materials carry it, since when, and who last approved it.
Why Spreadsheets Fall Short
Many companies still try to track this in spreadsheets or email threads. That works as long as a single person keeps the overview. Once multiple brands, languages, or sales channels enter the picture, three recurring failure points emerge:
- Outdated copies of the list circulate in parallel.
- Changes aren't carried through to every channel.
- If a regulator asks, the origin of a claim can no longer be fully reconstructed.
This is exactly where a structured approach inside a Product Information Management System (PIM) comes in.
The Solution: Keeping Product Claims Under Control Across Marketing, the PIM System and Technical Documentation
Marketing and Technical Documentation Share the Same Duty
The same substantiation duty doesn't just apply to marketing copy. Instructions for use, technical data sheets, safety data sheets, and technical specifications also contain study-based, regulated statements, for example about dosage, active ingredient concentration, or material properties. Technical writers have to document their statements just as traceably as marketing does. Both disciplines face the same underlying problem: consistently documenting a statement, its source, its validity, and everywhere it's used.
Audit Trail: Full Traceability
An audit trail records chronologically who changed what and when in a system, including the old and new value. In the pharmaceutical, biotech, and medical device industries, this isn't optional, it's a regulatory requirement under GxP rules and 21 CFR Part 11 of the US FDA. The same principle applies to marketing claims, even when no approval authority is directly asking: in a competitor lawsuit or a consumer-protection warning, a company has to be able to prove since when a statement was used in which version. A PIM system like NovaDB delivers exactly that proof at the push of a button, instead of having to reconstruct it manually from emails and file versions.
Versioning and Expiry Dates as Mandatory Fields
A marketing claim shouldn't be maintained as free text in a PIM system, but as its own attribute with mandatory fields: source study, approval date, person responsible, and, critically, an expiry date. When that date passes, for example because a study is considered outdated after three years under applicable rules, the system automatically flags the claim for review instead of letting it run on unnoticed. This versioning also makes visible which version of a claim was active at any given time, a detail that, in follow-up disputes, is the difference between a substantiated statement and a vulnerable one.
Attribute History and Channel Mapping
Alongside traceability over time, you need traceability across space: on which channels was a claim published, packaging, online store, print catalog, social media. A PIM system like NovaDB with clean channel mapping links every claim to the products and output channels where it actually appeared. If the underlying study changes, the system immediately shows which channels are affected and need updating, instead of that check having to happen manually, channel by channel.
Approval Workflows and Ownership
What matters isn't how many people sign off on a claim, but that the functionally responsible party has actually done so before the statement goes live. A defined approval workflow determines which role is responsible depending on the product category, for example Regulatory Affairs for pharmaceutical claims or Quality Assurance for technical statements, and brings in Legal where needed. A PIM system can technically enforce this step: a claim can only be published once the intended approval is actually documented. In a dispute, that shows not just what a claim is based on, but who reviewed it.
Where It Gets More Complex in Practice
The building blocks described here solve the core problem, but in practice further layers come into play that this article can only touch on: multilingual claims that are regulated differently depending on the market, linking a claim to individual product variants rather than just a general product description, clear escalation paths when marketing and regulatory affairs disagree, and migrating an existing, unstructured body of claims into a new system.
Conclusion
EmpCo, effective September 27, 2026, is the immediate trigger, but the underlying issue goes far beyond it: every study-based marketing claim needs a source, an expiry date, a documented approval, and a traceable list of where it's been used, across both marketing and technical documentation. Companies that currently manage this in spreadsheets shouldn't wait until the next regulatory inquiry or warning letter to treat it as a problem, they should check now whether their PIM system structurally covers these requirements.
With clean channel mapping in a PIM system, this can be looked up directly: for every claim, the system shows all products, packaging, and channels where the statement has been used, currently or in the past, printed or digital.
As soon as the underlying study, approval, or legal situation changes, or once the expiry date stored in the PIM system is reached. A mandatory expiry-date field prevents that point from passing unnoticed.
The substantiation duty rests with the advertising company itself, regardless of whether an external study or a service provider supplied the original statement. A documented approval process and a complete audit trail don't remove this liability, but they do reduce the risk in a dispute, because they show who reviewed and approved the claim, and when.
Depending on the legal area, this can lead to warning letters, fines, or, in the case of EmpCo, penalties of up to 4 percent of annual turnover. Affected materials then have to be revised on short notice.
Yes. Instructions for use, technical data sheets, and safety data sheets follow the same principles as marketing copy: a statement has to be based on a source and documented traceably, typically through a CCMS rather than a PIM system.
Tobias Denninger
After completing his Bachelor of Science in Online Marketing at the University of Applied Sciences Würzburg-Schweinfurt (THWS) in 2021, he began his career in sales at Noxum. There, he gained solid experience in business development and continuously expanded his expertise.
In 2022, he took on the role of Account Manager with a focus on NovaDB. In this position, he is responsible for developing customer relationships and delivering tailored solutions based on NovaDB technology, with the aim of building long-term partnerships and creating measurable value for clients.