Fadel Partners, Inc.
Delivering Award-Winning Intellectual Property Management Software

FADEL Announces Brand Vision 5.0 Featuring Video Tracking

Thursday, April 06, 2023

NEW YORK: FADEL®, innovator of brand compliance, rights management, and royalty billing software, today announced video tracking with the release of Brand Vision 5.0. Brand Vision is a unified platform for ensuring brand compliance by managing and monitoring marketing content and its license terms across the entire content lifecycle, from pre-production to post-distribution. This release includes new features designed to improve the management of assets and asset rights, increase interoperability across the marketing workflow, and the release showcases powerful new video tracking capabilities.

“With the volume of marketing content that brands are publishing – from static images and photos to video spots, explainers, testimonials, and reels – tracking down content post-distribution can be a nightmare. Yet marketing teams need to update branding, monitor for expirations of talent agreements and assets, and generally track the usage of their valued assets,” said Gregg Guest, FADEL’s VP of Product Management - Cloud Solutions. “I am really excited about the launch of Brand Vision - Content Tracking for video because we designed the product to help with just that. Content Tracking will find live image and video content across web and social media channels, and report on violations and expirations.”

With Content Tracking, marketing teams can take action when assets are expired, near expiration, or in violation. This release includes enhancements to image tracking, making it even more powerful than before. Image assets that are colorized, cropped, resized, or have creative designs applied will be found across websites, retail sites such as Amazon, and a brand’s social media sites including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Content Tracking also now includes sophisticated video matching and tracking capabilities, including premium support for YouTube in the current release and support for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter shortly in the next release. The product will identify all of the short-form videos across specified sites, match them against those in your rights-managed database - even if just a portion of the video is published within another video, and notify users of expirations and usage violations.

“Video is critical to a company’s marketing strategy, yet ensuring its usage is and remains compliant is always a key requirement for our customers,” said Tarek Fadel, Founder and CEO of FADEL. “Brand Vision is a complete solution that helps our users achieve greater efficiency and effectiveness in managing their digital assets and agreements, and these enhanced capabilities give our customers the tools and assurances they need. Large global FMCG, Beauty, Fashion, and Beverage brands are lined up for trials of our new and updated Brand Vision - Content Tracking solution.”

Companies can find more information or request a demo by clicking here. The solution will also be showcased at an upcoming Henry Stewart webinar on Wednesday, May 17th.

FADEL Expands Executive Leadership Team with Chief Revenue Officer

Friday, June 30, 2023

NEW YORK: FADEL®, innovator of brand compliance, rights management, and royalty billing software, today announces the appointment of Frank Matticola to the newly created role of Chief Revenue Officer. He will work closely with Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Tarek Fadel, to drive the next stage of growth for the company’s cloud-based Brand Vision, IPM Suite, and PictureDesk platforms. Frank will be based out of FADEL’s NYC headquarters, leading the sales organization for markets worldwide.

With a wealth of technology expertise spanning 25 years, Frank has honed his skills in sales management, particularly focusing on companies in the pre-revenue to $100 million revenue growth phase for the past 12 years. In the early stages of his career, he excelled in prominent, industry-defining organizations such as Yahoo, DoubleClick, and Google. Subsequently, Frank transitioned to smaller, emerging companies, starting with Chango, where he joined as the fourth employee. Utilizing his data-driven and strategic approach to growth, Frank played a pivotal role in propelling Chango from a pre-revenue stage to exceeding $40 million, culminating in its successful acquisition after four years.

As the VP of Sales at Demandbase, Frank contributed significantly to the company's success by driving revenues from $25 million to $100 million. In his most recent position as the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) at SalesScreen, a cloud-based sales force efficiency tool, Frank demonstrated exceptional leadership. He led various teams, including Field Sales, Sales Development Representatives (SDR), Customer Success, Marketing, Revenue Enablement, and Operations, and his guidance resulted in remarkable revenue growth and improved unit economics.

“After the recent completion of our IPO on AIM of the London Stock Exchange, FADEL continues to grow its team and roll out new platforms and functionality. Frank has the ideal skills to expand our market presence with his proven and pragmatic approach,” explained Tarek Fadel. “He has guided multiple teams and organizations through successful growth. We’re excited to have him on the FADEL team.”

Frank will begin by thoroughly analyzing FADEL's customer profile as his primary focus. He will then develop a methodology to attract talented individuals and establish a sales culture of exceptional standards, characterized by accountability and motivation. This culture will contribute to ongoing customer success and ensure long-term relationships. Frank emphasized the importance of designing a sales team that aligns with customers' requirements in terms of skills, talent, and target markets. This alignment is crucial in enabling customers to address their mission-critical challenges effectively. Frank expressed his admiration for FADEL's pioneering position in rights and royalty management, as well as the strength of its management team and organizational culture. He is eager to leverage his experience in revenue growth and team development to support FADEL's expansion efforts and cater to evolving customer demands.

11 Avoidable Expenses Most Licensees Are Paying

Wednesday, November 08, 2023

Licensees pay substantial royalties for the rights to use licensed IP, with the intention that these properties generate revenue and turn a profit. Yet many licensees are paying avoidable expenses due to lack of visibility into their operations and error-prone processes for reporting and managing royalty payments. These 11 expenses could be eating away at your profits.

1. Overpayment of Royalties Licensees often overpay royalties in order to mitigate the legal and commercial risk of underpayment. For example, a FADEL client in the high-tech space consistently—and intentionally—overpaid by 10-15%. They subsequently reduced overpayments to zero after implementing the FADEL system, saving $200k+/annum.

2. Contingency Fees Based on experience with audits by major licensors, some licensees’ best practices include managing a reserve of 15-20% of royalty expense as a contingency for underpayment. FADEL clients have been able to hone their accuracy, eliminating the need for contingency funds and freeing up cash for other corporate objectives.

3. Forfeiture of Discounts, Allowances and Chargebacks Some manufacturers pre-pay royalties as soon as the product ships to a retailer. As returns come in, the pre-paid royalties should to be credited to the manufacturer, but many manufacturers are unable to accurately track the credits due back to them and forfeit this revenue. Additionally, many licensees do not have a way to manage caps on discounts and allowances for returns and therefore forfeit them, losing between 5-10%.

4. Audit Prep Time Licensees are subject to audits and many large licensors have demanding expectations, steep requirements and varying frequencies. The workload generated can be enormous; one licensee reported 200 hours over a year’s time. An automated system like FADEL’s with full reporting capabilities gives licensees immediate access to the data required to respond to audits with accuracy and speed. With a full audit trail and set of financial reports, audit prep time can be cut in half.

5. Violation Fees Violations are almost always unintentional…and costly. Assuming a 100K sales violation in an unauthorized territory at a 10% royalty rate, many licensors will charge 3x the royalty as a penalty, and in situations where audits are only performed every 3-5 years, interest is typically compounded over the term of the violation. Other potential negative impacts include loss of rights and increased rates imposed for sales in unapproved channels, territories or accounts. A system that generates violation warnings when they occur and allows teams to view sales data against contract terms can eliminate these unnecessary fees.

6. Inflated Audit Bills Audits often result in penalty fees that may or may not relate to accurate violations, and the onus is on the licensee to disprove any claims, which can require significant manual analysis across multiple departments and resources. One licensee was charged a penalty fee for a violation assumed from a keyword search that turned out to be unrelated to the licensor. This licensee projected that a system like FADEL’s would not only reduce violations, but help them respond to an audit more effectively, cutting the amount owed by 50% or more.

7. Shortfall on Minimum Guarantees and Other Key Performance Indicators Many licensors are requiring minimums by territory, channel, store and more that could range from 1/3 to 1/2 of the royalty payment. Licensees are required to pay out unearned royalties if the minimum is not met, and run the risk of the licensor recapturing the territory, channel, etc. for underperformance. The ability to stage performance against contract terms and confirm financial obligations such as minimum guarantees are being met helps sales teams meet their commitments.

8. Missed Revenue Opportunities Many licensees forfeit revenue opportunities from co-branded assortments because they have no way to manage multiple payouts on a product sale. A scalable rights and royalty management system like FADEL’s automatically captures and calculates products requiring more than one payout, empowering sales teams to create bundled products for further revenue opportunities.

9. Painstaking Statement Generation Many licensors are very specific about how they want their data presented, and without a templatized system, licensees must manually generate each individual report according to the licensor’s guidelines. One licensee generates 40-50 different reports for various licensors and it can take them up to 3 days per report to roll royalty information up into the correct format. This translates to months of time spent on reporting alone.

10. Time-Consuming Forecasting While most quarterly forecasts may only take a couple of hours, some licensors ask for very detailed forecasts entailing reporting by retailer, channel and licensor property, which can take as long as a week to create. Automated rollups reduce forecasting time from weeks to days.

11. Contract Interpretation and Negotiation After a contract is completed, licensing managers often spend days summarizing the terms of the agreement in order to create a consumable reference document for teams and management. FADEL clients can say goodbye to interpretation of lengthy contracts and tracking actuals and royalty payouts in spreadsheets with a single platform that captures rights and payment terms and manages them against the contract. Analytics capabilities give licensees the data they need to negotiate more favorable terms for the renewal period.