The pre-launch compliance checklist for a SaaS campaign or feature announcement

A campaign brief names one market and one launch date. The marketing site loads in every country with a connection, and the announcement post is indexed everywhere within the hour. That gap is where launches break: the feature was cleared for the US, the copy went live globally, and a supervisory authority in Dublin reads the same page your Kansas prospect reads.

The question here is narrow and operational: who signs off what, in which order, and what it costs when a launch ships into a market nobody cleared.

Clearance is per market, not per campaign

Meta launched Threads in July 2023 without the EU, and only opened it to European users that December. In June 2024 it paused its plans for Meta AI in Europe after the Irish Data Protection Commission intervened, and the assistant did not reachreachThe number of unique people exposed to your message in a given period. Unlike impressions, reach counts each person once, no matter how often they see it.View full definition → EU users until 2025. Apple shipped Apple Intelligence to US iPhones in October 2024 and to the EU in April 2025, citing the Digital Markets Act for the delay. Microsoft announced Recall in May 2024, pulled it from the Copilot+ launch within weeks after the UK ICO opened enquiries, rebuilt it as opt-in with encryption, and shipped it broadly the following year.

None of those were creative failures. In each case a launch team decided, before the campaign existed, which markets the thing was cleared for, and accepted a staggered launch instead of a global one. The alternative is discovering the answer after the ads are live, when three things happen at once: committed media spend is forfeited, the pulled page keeps ranking in search, and your own sales team is quoting a deck that no longer matches the product's availability.

Price that out before you argue about the checklist's cost. Meta's pay-or-consent model drew a €200 million DMA fine in April 2025. A pulled B2B campaign at quarter end is smaller but not small: paid mediapaid mediaVisitors arriving via paid ads or sponsored placements, where you pay a platform to display your message rather than earning visits organically.View full definition → already booked, an SDR sequence that has to be recalled mid-flight, and a launch slip that lands the announcement in the next quarter's pipelinepipelineAll active sales opportunities across the stages of the sales process, together with their combined potential value and probability of closing.View full definition →.

The three checks that matter most

1. Claims and pricing gate (legal)

What counts as adequate support for a quantified claim is the subject of this module's opening lesson, and trial-to-paid and cancellation language belongs to the consumer-protection lesson alongside it. The gate's job is different: confirm the document exists, is dated, names an owner, and still matches what shipped. Four things break this in practice.

• Approvals go stale. A benchmark cleared in March describes a product that has shipped twenty times by September. Put an expiry on every approval, 90 days is a workable default, and re-clear anything still running past it.
• The approved page is one of nine. Legal reads the control; the growth team then spins up variants, personalisation tokenstokensA token is the basic unit of text that language models process, often a word fragment, whole word, or punctuation mark rather than a single character.View full definition → and paid social copy from it. Every variant is a separate claim. Either the variants go through the gate or the gate covers a page almost nobody sees.
• Translation creates new claims. A superlative that is fine in US English can breach local advertising rules once it is rendered in German or French, and localisation vendors are not lawyers. Route translated pricing and comparison copy back through the gate for the markets it targets.
• The field escapes it entirely. Sales decks, booth panels and partner co-marketing carry the same claims with none of the sign-off. Publish an approved claims library and make it the only source sellers copy from.

Practical rule: any surface with a price, a percentage or a competitor's name on it gets a ticket, whoever built it.

2. Accessibility check (design and engineering, with legal oversight)

Digital content has to be usable with a screen reader, by keyboard alone, and at readable contrast. The controlling standard is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), currently version 2.2, maintained by the W3C.

In the US, courts have read the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to cover websites, and a few thousand digital accessibility suits are filed each year. SaaS marketing pages are an easy target because plaintiffs' firms scan them automatically at scale. In the EU, the European Accessibility Act has applied since 28 June 2025 and reaches e-commerce and many digital services.

The failure mode is sequencing. Teams run this check after creative lock, when fixing contrast means reworking the brand palette and re-cutting the video. Run it on the design file, not the staging build.

Minimum pre-launch check for any new landing pagelanding pageA standalone web page built for a single campaign goal, designed to maximise conversions by removing distractions and focusing visitors on one action.View full definition → or campaign microsite:

• Automated scan (WAVE from WebAIM, or axe from Deque; both firms sell paid accessibility services on top of the free tools)
• Manual keyboard-only navigation test
• Contrast ratio check (WCAG AA minimum is 4.5:1 for normal text)
• Alt text on campaign imagery, plus captions on any launch video

Agency-built microsites sitting outside your design system fail these most often, and nobody owns them after the campaign ends.

3. Data-privacy language for new features (legal plus product marketing)

Any announcement touching customer data (an AI assistant reading support tickets, an integration pulling calendar data, a dashboard aggregating usage) needs its privacy language reviewed before the announcement, not after.

Under GDPRGDPREU regulation governing how organizations collect, store and use personal data, with fines tied to global revenue for breaches.View full definition →, a new purpose, a new sub-processor or a new data category likely triggers a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA), the risk assessment required for high-risk processing, before the feature ships. Recall is the cautionary version: the security and privacy questions arrived through the press and a regulator rather than through an internal gate, and the rebuild cost Microsoft roughly a year.

Checklist for any AI or data-related feature announcement:

• Does the announcement copy match what the DPIA actually concluded, sentence by sentence?
• Is the sub-processor list updated the same day? It is a public page, and journalists read it against your press release.
• Has security confirmed that every "encrypted", "anonymised" or "never used to train models" claim is true of the shipped build, including the enterprise tier and the free tier separately?

Tier drift is the quiet one. A data-handling promise that holds for the paid plan and not the free plan is a false claim on the pricing page, and the free plan is where the volume is.

Building the sign-off workflow

Five gates, run in sequence rather than in parallel, because each can send the campaign back a step.

1. Market clearance (product plus legal): which countries the feature and the copy are cleared for, and what gets geogeoThe practice of making your brand and content visible and citable inside AI-generated answers from tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.View full definition →-gated.
2. Claims and pricing (legal): every quantified or comparative claim has a dated source attached.
3. Privacy (legal plus security): every data claim matches the DPIA and the shipped build.
4. Accessibility (design/engineering): automated and manual checks pass WCAG 2.2 AA.
5. Final sign-off (marketing lead): confirms the gates cleared, with named approvers logged.

Keep it as a shared ticket, not an email thread:

Campaign: [name]
Launch date: [date]
Markets cleared: [list]  Geo-gated: [list]
Gate 1 - Market clearance: [Approver] [Date]
Gate 2 - Claims/Pricing: [Approver] [Date] [Link to substantiation doc] [Expires]
Gate 3 - Privacy: [Approver] [Date] [Link to DPIA/privacy review]
Gate 4 - Accessibility: [Approver] [Date] [Scan report link]
Gate 5 - Final sign-off: [Marketing lead] [Date]
Kill-switch owner: [name] [phone]

Set an escalation threshold so the process scales: below a defined spend or reach, the marketing lead signs; above it, or for anything naming a competitor, the general counsel does. A named approver per line means that when something slips you know which gate failed, and you fix the gate rather than the page.

What "good" looks like in practice

Mature teams build the gates into project tooling so a campaign cannot reach "scheduled" without every sign-off logged, and they rehearse the kill switch: one named person, reachable outside office hours, with the access to pull paid media and unpublish a page inside an hour. Most companies only discover they lack that person at 11pm on a launch night.

The checklist costs a few hours per campaign. Skipping it costs legal fees, forfeited media, an engineering rebuild on someone else's schedule, and the slower damage of a marketing team that legal no longer trusts to ship without supervision. Once you are in that position, every launch takes two weeks longer, permanently.

Key Takeaways

• Decide which markets a launch is cleared for before creative starts. Apple, Meta and Microsoft all staggered launches by months rather than ship into an uncleared jurisdiction.
• Approvals expire and variants multiply: re-clear anything still running after 90 days, and put A/B variants, translations and sales decks through the same gate as the control page.
• Run accessibility on the design file, not the staging build. WCAG 2.2 AA, an automated scan plus one keyboard test, catches most failures before a rework is expensive.
• Check data claims against the shipped build tier by tier; a promise that holds on the paid plan and not the free one is a false claim on your pricing page.
• Log named approvers on five gates and name a kill-switch owner with out-of-hours access. Accountability that cannot be traced is not accountability.