Case study · Ad verification · Cooperative advertising
How a US cooperative advertising verification bureau automated 1,680 dealer ad audits monthly.
A century-old bureau serving Fortune 500 auto and retail brands replaced a human-intensive digital audit workflow with a managed AI pipeline. Here's what we built and why it works.
Engagement summary
1,680 AI-audited dealer compliance reports, delivered monthly.
One anonymized recurring engagement, built for a buyer whose mandate is enterprise digital transformation. The work replaced a manual workflow that didn't scale with the migration of dealer advertising from print to digital.
“This is our digital transformation showpiece. What used to take a room of auditors now runs overnight and we review exceptions.” — VP of Innovation, US cooperative advertising verification bureau
The problem
Manual dealer-site audits didn't scale with the move from print to digital.
Cooperative advertising verification is an old, exacting business. When national brands reimburse dealers for running local ads, they rely on an independent bureau to confirm the ads comply with brand guidelines — colors, disclaimers, logo placement, approved language, current legal copy.
For decades this ran on print: bureau staff flipped through physical ad tearsheets against brand rulebooks, approved or flagged, issued reimbursement reports. It worked because print volume was bounded.
Digital broke the model. Every dealer now runs a website, runs paid digital, updates disclaimers seasonally, adds promotional overlays, rotates pricing. Checking each dealer site against brand guidelines became a bottleneck the bureau could not hire through.
The bureau's VP of Innovation had a mandate to find a way to automate the digital audit without losing the exceptions-only review discipline that gave bureau reports their credibility.
The solution
A managed AI pipeline that runs overnight and produces exception reports.
We built a recurring pipeline that visits every dealer site on the brand roster, captures screenshots plus DOM snapshots, runs AI visual inspection against brand guideline rules, and uses LLM extraction to verify required disclaimer language.
Every month, the pipeline produces one PDF report per dealer — ~1,680 reports total — listing every compliance exception with screenshots and the specific guideline rule breached. The bureau's audit team reviews exceptions only; sites passing all rules auto-approve.
Everything runs as a managed service: rotating proxies, browser fleet, CAPTCHA resolution, retries, schema versioning, automated QA. Delivery is on the bureau's schedule, in their preferred format, with a named point of contact when something goes wrong.
DEALER SITE AUDIT PIPELINE — ~1,680 RUNS / MONTH
┌───────────────┐ ┌───────────────┐ ┌────────────────┐
│ Brand roster │──▶──│ Browser fleet │──▶──│ Screenshot + │
│ (dealer URLs) │ │ (proxies+CAP) │ │ DOM snapshot │
└───────────────┘ └───────────────┘ └────────┬───────┘
│
▼
┌───────────────┐ ┌───────────────┐ ┌────────────────┐
│ PDF delivery │──◀──│ Exception │──◀──│ AI visual + │
│ (one/dealer) │ │ report build │ │ LLM extraction │
└───────────────┘ └───────────────┘ └────────────────┘
Monthly cadence · SLA-backed · Exception-only review model The numbers
What this looks like in production.
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Monthly volume
~1,680
dealer audit reports delivered per month, one PDF per dealer.
-
Engagement size
Mid-5-figure
monthly recurring revenue. Multi-year engagement, ongoing.
-
Audit model
Exception-only
bureau staff review flagged issues. Clean dealer sites auto-approve.
// this pattern repeats
If you run brand compliance, ad verification, or retail intelligence audits — the same pipeline pattern likely applies to your work.
We scope each engagement to your volume, cadence, and format. Quote in 24 hours. Monthly recurring retainer, no per-seat subscription.