Enabling a Global Beverage Alcohol Company’s Marketing Transformation

Marketer Challenge

The organization had accumulated 17 different marketing policies and standards, all stored in PDFs across SharePoint. Marketers struggled to answer even basic questions, such as whether they could engage an influencer in Singapore, without:

• Searching across up to eight different documents
• Piecing together their own interpretation
• Requesting validation from the Office of General Counsel (OGC)
• Even when marketers did their due diligence, legal still had to reinterpret everything, leading to long delays, inconsistent guidance, and unnecessary risk exposure. Leadership initially believed the problem was too many documents. But conversations with end users revealed a deeper issue: Marketers couldn’t operationalize the guidance they were given. The system was not designed for decision-making at speed.

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Approach

Policy Simplification & Restructuring

Over two months, we transformed 17 documents into five clear, coherent, and logically structured policies. Every requirement was mapped to real-world use cases gathered from interviews with marketers, procurement, compliance, finance, and legal partners.

This revealed an essential insight: the bottleneck wasn’t policy wording, rather it was accessibility and context. Working with the enterprise AI platform team, we deployed a governed AI environment that delivers contextual, market-specific, and role-aware guidance. For example, when a Singapore-based PacRim Marketing Lead with $100K authority asks about influencer engagement, the system instantly returns tailored requirements based on:

• Region and regulatory restrictions
• Brand and product category rules
• Budget thresholds
• Contractual and disclosure obligations
• Previous campaigns and historical patterns

No PDF searches. No manual synthesis. No waiting.

The AI system now triggers downstream workflows automatically:

• Budget workflow: checks remaining spend and alerts Finance
• Procurement workflow: initiates contracting steps and pre-populates SOW requirements
• Legal workflow: packages relevant rules for a fast, traceable “light-touch review”

Everything is audit-ready, consistent, and logged.

Every answer is linked back to policy citations, which enables:

• Faster legal sign-off
• Fewer full reviews
• Clear traceability for compliance and audit teams

The system learns from repeated use cases, and guidance improves over time. Community-of-Practice insights become machine-readable rules, ensuring the knowledge base evolves. If a legal partner is out of office, another attorney can seamlessly step in—all context is preserved and surfaced automatically. What began as a policy cleanup became a fundamental rewrite of how marketing decisions are made.

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Outcomes

Dramatically accelerated marketing velocity:  Time to get guidance dropped from 6 days to 5 minutes. Legal sign-off now averages 6 hours, not multiple days.

83% reduction in legal escalations:  Only 17% of campaigns now require full OGC interpretation—an 83% decrease in policy interpretation escalations.

A more confident, innovative marketing team: Marketers are empowered to create, test, and execute campaigns without delays, improving creativity and time-to-market.

Legal gains greater control with less effort: Consistency, traceability, and auditability improved—while legal workload decreased.

Enterprise expansion and sponsorship: When presented to the CMO, the results led to additional funding and expansion of the approach to HR and other enterprise functions.

A New Governance Model for AI-Enabled Marketing: This engagement demonstrated that the future of marketing governance isn’t document-based; it’s contextual, automated, and embedded directly into workflows. The company now operates with a scalable, governed AI guidance platform that increases speed, reduces risk, and empowers teams globally.

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