The Rights Chain Is the Supply Chain
Ben Woollams founded TrueRights after eight years in influencer marketing, latterly as Executive Commercial Director at Influencer, where he saw the rights management gap up close: brands with thousands of creator partnerships storing their usage terms in emails, AI platforms asking how to integrate talent IP ethically, and no standardised framework anywhere in the ecosystem.
“Six out of ten digital campaigns breach talent usage rights. There are no tools that help any stakeholder understand how they should be using content when they’ve bought the rights.”
Ben Woollams is the founder of TrueRights, a digital rights and IP licensing platform built for the age of generative AI. TrueRights sits between IP owners and AI and media platforms, standardising how content, likeness, and other IP are licensed, protected, and monetised. He founded the company in September 2024 after eight years at Influencer, the influencer marketing platform.
Ben started his career at UBS, joining their school leavers programme at seventeen and spending three and a half years in wealth management before a friend’s startup opportunity pulled him toward influencer marketing. He joined Influencer as employee number three, working through account executive, sales, and partnerships roles before becoming Global Director of Platform Partnerships and then Executive Commercial Director for EMEA. In the partnerships role he worked directly with major social platforms to help them build out their creator commercial ecosystems, which gave him a clear view of where the rights management infrastructure was missing.
TrueRights is built on two products. The TrueRights Stamp embeds metadata, licensing terms, rights holder information, market use, and AI training permissions directly into content using the C2PA content credentials standard, allowing the platform to monitor how content is used after it leaves the hands of the creator. The TrueRights Wallet structures and labels the training data of a creator’s IP, including mannerisms, personality, and physical attributes, so it can be shared securely with generative AI tools for authorised branded content production. A conversation with TikTok about TikTok Symphony, their end-to-end AI creative service, was the catalyst for building it.
“Brands are buying rights for 300 pieces of content and using 20.”
“Ask any global brand how they consolidate rights. The answer is always the same: check your inbox.”
The rights management crisis in content marketing is not caused by bad actors. It is caused by a total absence of infrastructure. Brands working with thousands of creators simultaneously have no centralised record of what they can use, where, for how long, in which markets, and across which formats. Content that was licensed for three months stays live for two years. Pieces licenced for TikTok UK appear on global campaigns. Talent agencies have responded by pricing usage rights at the highest possible rate to account for the likely misuse. The result is a market that is expensive and unfair for both sides.
“AI has made it obvious your image can be used without authorisation. Content rights, AI rights, IP rights. All of it matters now.”
The IP rights problem in influencer marketing has existed since the first creator contract was written. What AI changed is the visibility and the stakes. Deepfakes, synthetic avatars, and tools like TikTok Symphony that can generate a campaign from a product URL and an AI likeness make the gap between ‘licensed’ and ‘authorised’ impossible to ignore. TrueRights’s Stamp is designed for exactly this moment: embedding provenance and licensing information into content at the point of creation so that any platform that encounters it downstream can read what the creator has and has not consented to.
“Think of it like a supply chain. You can’t run a business without knowing where your inventory comes from.”
Ben’s analogy for what TrueRights is building comes from the music industry, where PRS functions as an auditing body in the middle of a complex ecosystem, managing provenance and payments between rights holders and content users at scale. Content marketing is arriving at the same structural need. As brands build larger and more complex creator relationships, and as AI makes the downstream use of that content more powerful and more difficult to monitor, the rights chain will need to function with the same rigour as the supply chain. The brands that build that infrastructure early will avoid the compliance exposure that is already arriving from regulators and talent unions.
Stay close to the conversation.
New leaders and insights. No noise.