New Regulations? No Sweat: This Sporting Goods Leader Accelerated Compliance

Compliance with government regulations is serious business for brands. And when new regulations come up, they can heavily impact marketing workflows. 

That’s what happened to one of our clients when Québec’s Bill 96 went into effect. This bill mandated that French would become the primary language for business, and our client needed to enable bilingual campaigns.   

Where there’s a workflow, there’s a way! Read on to find out how we partnered with this client to help ensure compliance and reduce a tedious, manual workload.  

This enterprise brand is a leader in sporting goods manufacturing and has history of excellence that goes back 100+ years. The brand sells to 120+ countries, so the marketing team is no stranger to localization demands.  

Québec’s Bill 96 mandated that French would become the primary language for business, and the bill went into effect on June 1, 2025. To support compliance with Bill 96, our client needed a scalable way to produce English and French versions of every marketing campaign sent to the Québec audience. The marketing team was spending significant time duplicating campaigns, updating content manually, and ensuring proper language routing.  

The brand needed a scalable, automated approach to support bilingual campaigns with minimal manual effort. 

Our client partnering with the SAP Engagement Cloud team, and we developed a custom-built multilingual template based on IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force, a standard of language tagging on the internet).

Our team designed the template with Gmail Annotations to dynamically render English or French content based on the customer’s language code. This template streamlined the build process and supported compliance while reducing the operational load on the marketing team.

Compliance made easy with SAP Engagement Cloud Services

The SAP Engagement Cloud team worked closely with the brand to understand the unique needs and requirements for compliance with Bill 96. Our team delivered:

• A single IETF master template supporting English and French language codes.  

• Block-level multilingual support, including navigation, headers, disclaimers, and promotional copy.  

• Pre-translated and validated French blocks, ensuring accuracy and supporting Bill 96 compliance.  

• Automated ESL (Emarsys Scripting Language) logic to ensure each recipient receives the right language based on their profile data.  

• Predictable content structure for the marketing team, allowing plug-and-play campaign creation.

The anatomy of implementation for dynamic, multilingual automation 

The next step was implementation. Here’s how our team helped put the new tools into action for our client:

• Fully recreated the brand’s existing marketing and transactional layout in a compliant, bilingual format, a total of 45 English and 45 French campaigns.  

• Updated the catalog logic for both English and French (including missing translations).  

• Validated ESL to ensure correct language rendering and fallbacks.  

• Provided guidance and testing support for their team to adopt the workflow.  

• Ensured French links, product names, and catalog references aligned with regulatory expectations. 

With the IETF multilingual template in place, the brand took a complex bilingual compliance requirement as an opportunity to streamline and optimize workflows. The brand now produces campaigns faster, with greater accuracy, and with full confidence in meeting Bill 96 standards. Our mutual partnership for this project showcases how SAP Engagement Cloud and our expertise in Services address real-world regulatory needs while empowering marketing teams.  

Our client saw numerous benefits from the project: 

• 50–70% reduction in build time per campaign: Marketers no longer duplicate campaigns manually because one build covers both English and French. 

• Consistent and compliant French content: The template enforces language standards automatically, reducing the possibility of errors.  

• Scalable for all future campaigns: Any new campaign can now be built once and automatically support both languages.  

• Fewer reviews: Because the template handles structure, logic, and translatable fields, the marketing team spends less time on quality assurance and more time launching.  

• Improved internal alignment: The brand’s internal teams now share a repeatable framework that simplifies multi-language communication requirements. 

• Adoption of IETF template: This template helps streamline operations for other regions with multi-language audiences.  

Other regions quickly began implementing this templatized approach after witnessing the efficiency gains firsthand! 

Change is inevitable, and government regulations even more so. Brands must adapt in the face of change, but when a workflow becomes cumbersome, it’s worth questioning, exploring, and innovating. 

The SAP Engagement Cloud team is proud to partner with our clients, providing the services and creative solutions that free marketers from tedious tasks so they can focus on the bigger picture.