Most distributors who use co-op at all use it for print. A flyer, a counter display, a direct mail piece, maybe a trade publication ad. The claim gets filed, the money comes back, and that is the extent of it.
Meanwhile the same business is running Google Ads, paid social and a website featuring the manufacturers' products, and funding all of it out of pocket. In most programmes, a substantial share of that would have been reimbursed.
The gap is habit, not eligibility
Co-op programmes have broadly modernised. Most now cover digital advertising, paid social, email campaigns, video, and web pages featuring the brand, alongside the traditional print and signage categories.
What has not modernised is the claiming habit. Co-op is frequently administered by whoever has done it for years, using the categories they have always used, against a rulebook they last read a while ago. Digital spend sits in a different budget, approved by different people, and nobody connects the two.
So the money goes unclaimed — not because it was refused, but because nobody asked.
What is commonly covered
- Paid search campaigns featuring the manufacturer's products or brand
- Paid social advertising, including lead campaigns aimed at contractors
- Email campaigns promoting specific lines or promotions
- Website pages and landing pages built around the brand's products
- Video production showing the product in use
- Trade show presence, booth graphics and the collateral that goes with it
- Branch signage and in-store display
Specifics vary by manufacturer and the only reliable answer is in your own programme documentation. But if you have assumed digital is not covered, that assumption is worth checking before this programme year closes.
Why the claims that do get filed fail
Two reasons, and both are decided before the campaign runs rather than after.
The first is creative compliance. Programmes have specific requirements — logo placement and minimum clear space, approved colour values, mandated legal and trademark lines, rules about which competing brands may appear alongside, sometimes a minimum share of the piece given to the manufacturer. Miss one and the claim is denied. Not revised, denied, after you have already paid for the campaign.
The second is documentation. The thing that gets reimbursed is not the campaign; it is the evidence of the campaign in the format the manufacturer requires. For digital that usually means screenshots of the creative in place, platform spend reports tied to the specific campaign, and dates proving it ran inside the claim period.
Almost none of that can be assembled afterwards. A campaign restructured three months ago will not produce a clean report for the period, and nobody screenshots an ad that is no longer running. The documentation has to be collected as the work runs.
The deadline nobody is tracking
Funds generally expire at the end of the programme year and do not roll forward. No warning is sent. The balance simply stops existing.
This is why a December scramble rarely works. Creative may need pre-approval, the activity has to have actually run inside the period, and the claim has to be filed before the window shuts. Discovering an unclaimed balance with three weeks left usually means watching most of it lapse.
Programme years also rarely line up with your calendar or with each other, so a distributor working with several manufacturers has several different deadlines and typically no consolidated view of any of them.
Where to start
- List every manufacturer programme you participate in and find the current rules for each — not the version from three years ago
- Find out what is accrued and unclaimed right now, and when each programme year ends
- Check what your digital spend over the last year would have qualified for. That number is usually the persuasive one
- Put one person in charge of it. Co-op falls between purchasing and marketing and belongs to neither by default, which is the root cause of most of this
- Build compliance into the next campaign from the first draft rather than retrofitting it
The short version
The fastest improvement available to most distributors is not finding new marketing money. It is routing marketing you are already doing through a programme you already have. The constraint is compliance and paperwork, not eligibility — and both are manageable once somebody owns them.