State exam request lists ask for advertising early and specifically: copies of advertisements run during the review period, across media, often naming social media outright. The companies that struggle are rarely the ones with a bad ad. They are the ones who cannot produce what ran, because nobody kept it.
What "complete" means
A marketing file that survives an exam holds four things:
- The advertisement as published: the post with its image, the page as it rendered, the video as it played. A reconstruction is not the record.
- The full footprint: company channels, every sponsored officer's business presence, and every trade name's pages, not just the accounts marketing manages.
- The review trail: what was checked, what was found, and what was corrected, with dates. A finding that was fixed on a tracked clock reads very differently from one the examiner discovers first.
- The complaints that arrived through marketing channels, with their assessments and responses.
How long to keep it
Retention windows are set state by state, and they differ. Rather than manage a patchwork, our practice standard is to preserve marketing evidence for five years, write-once, which comfortably covers the common state windows and means the answer to "can you produce it" is yes without first checking a chart. Whatever window you adopt, the principle is the same: retention is decided by the longest rule you are subject to, not the shortest.
The quiet failure mode
Deleted content. An officer quietly removes a flagged post, and with it the evidence that the company caught and corrected the problem. Preservation has to happen at capture time, before correction, so the file shows both the issue and the fix.
What good practice looks like
- Capture marketing as it runs, automatically, across the whole footprint.
- Preserve evidence write-once, with the review and correction trail attached.
- Keep the complaint log beside the ad file; examiners read them together.
- Rehearse the request: could you produce last spring's posts for one officer today?
Audit Hound preserves every captured advertisement, finding, correction thread, and complaint case for five years, assembled into examiner-ready reports, so the marketing file is simply always current.
This article is compliance reference material, not legal advice. Rules change and states differ; confirm requirements for your licenses with your compliance advisor or counsel.